


Shoot The Moon Between The Eyes

by bioluminesce



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Books of Sorrow, Cute Kids, Enemies to Lovers, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 69,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22093327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/pseuds/bioluminesce
Summary: Savathûn has trapped Eris Morn and Toland in a cascading series of alternate realities, feeding off their journey through a labyrinth of worlds. In order to escape and to save the true Tower they'll need to out-think her and explore worlds where the Hive takes different forms, some terrible and some peaceful. Meanwhile, they need to figure out who they are to each other: from aloof codependency to love, all of that threaded through with what the Hive have done to their minds and bodies. (Also featuring cute Ghosts, cute Osmium princesses, and what exactly was up with those ???? patrols on the Dreadnaught.)
Relationships: Eris Morn/Toland
Comments: 86
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title source: “Clocks & Spoons” by John Prine

Eris Morn had discovered the castle of the Witch-Queen. She had sundered its definitions and charted its semantic pathways and fired a concussion missile into the heart of its generator. She was close, so close, to seeing Savathûn’s terrible face. She stood on a silver stone in the Ascendant Plane, carrying a letter of passage from Mara Sov and a gun of her own making.

More than anything, she was tired. Yes, she wanted to make sure the Last Human City’s children slept well, as much as she could. Yes, she wanted Guardians to be able to feel that they did not have to stand weary on their feet every day. Maybe, one day, because of this moment, the business of super-heroism could stop. (Regular heroism was a case of tiny steps both forward and backward, but, perhaps, villainy would one day no longer aspire to Savathûn’s scale.)

So, she was tired, but she knew what to do.

She turned a corner. Savathûn was not like Medusa, Eris thought: one could look into her many eyes and live on as one had before.

Eris turned the corner and saw.

Eris was wrong.

* * *

Eris lay on her side, the edge of a wool blanket curled comfortably under her nose. Soft, yellow light suffused the room, emanating from a candle. The room was small, and the source of the light sat in a golden taper only a few feet from the end of the soft mattress. The size of the room contributed to Eris’ overall feeling of safety and warmth. Besides the mattress on the floor, the little available floor space was cluttered. Books, candles, crystals, and more sat on the pale yellow tiles. If the ceiling had not been so high, the room would have been cozy. The yellow light dispersed through that columnar height, like a natural chimney.

She had never seen this room before.

She was reluctant, so reluctant, to push aside the warm blankets. It was hard to tell whether this was normal morning sleepiness or something worse. Where had she been last night? Where was she now?

One step at a time. It took her an eternity to motivate herself to sit up. The blanket was pleasantly heavy. She cast a half-lidded gaze over the stacked books, baskets, notebooks brimming with papers, and cushions cluttered between the bed and the wall.

 _Brya_? She thought. Her Ghost was—had been—missing.

There. One book was marked with the green sigil of the Hive. That was worth pushing aside the warm blanket in order to understand. She pushed the heavy blanket off. The air was just cold enough for her to want to put on another layer. She _remembered_ these clothes, the loose shirt, pants, and socks she slept in. In the basket would be a few pairs of civilian clothes. She had access to the vaults for anything else …

What vaults? Whose?

She stood up. The air smelled musty but not unpleasant, with a thick scent of dry herbs. Immediately next to her were various items set on a lap table. An awl, a scissor, a crystal polisher, and a selection of gem stones waited for clever hands there. The gems were in various stages of finishing, from smooth and faceted with runes carved into the sides, to natural stone still coated with gray dust.

Gun-smithing had become easier and easier for her over the years. Eris knew she did not have the skills and depth of knowledge of someone like Banshee, who ordered weapons or manufactured them from scratch and customized them in various ways. Eris simply knew what she liked, and she knew how to modify it in eldritch ways. The onyx beads she used she had mined from the Moon and melted in her own forge in the Ascendant Plane. (The location gave them particular qualities, but, she had often admitted to herself, she also simply did not like to spend a lot of time on the Moon if she did not have to.) So the things she made could be defined more accurately as curses and wards rather than calibrations and engineering.

None of her tools were here. These were gunsmiths’ tools, indeed, but not hers, and not the kind she used. Her memory was still fuzzy. Even idea of the time and place in which she had used her own tools were becoming distant. _All_ of her memories were out of reach. She was almost certain she thought of her dead Ghost, Brya, every morning and remembered her death anew every day. But she could not remember any of those mornings.

She picked up the book emblazoned with the Hive symbol.

Now, she remembered. Shortly after Ghaul attacked the Tower, she had gathered enough information about Savathûn’s gradual invasion to try to stop it. And then … here.

This place was another aspect of Witch-Queen trickery, of course. Savathûn wanted to show her something. Wherever Eris was physically, she was clearly trapped in some kind of illusion.

Unfortunately, it was a convincing one. The feeling of the tiles beneath her feet and the smell of the incense were clear.

The more she looked around the room, she realized it wasn’t just hers. The mattress was large enough for two people, but that by itself didn’t mean anything. What convinced her was the second basket for clothes, shorter and wider than hers, and the difference in the items on the left and right sides of the bed. Both were cluttered, but the right side tended more toward books, the left toward tools. She had woken up on the right, curled toward the edge of the bed. Judging by their contents, the things on the left side were more likely to be hers.

What a _pleasant_ place. What warmth from the pale walls, certainty from the rune-carved stones. She sat back and squeezed the blanket. Sheets were piled at the end of the bed. With a deep breath, she sorted her two contradictory thoughts. _This is the place I am meant to be_ could sit right beside _This is an illusion created to trap me_ , and, once accepted, the two thoughts no longer nagged at her.

The space left to walk in the room was only barely wide enough for her natural steps. She opened the bin of clothes. These were really hers, or once had been—she knew Eriana-3 knew this outfit, even if neither of them had paid excessive attention to it. Savathûn had dug into her memories to make her comfortable.

That comfort was a trap, of course, but still Eris enjoyed a feeling of security as she dressed. The door locked from the inside, so she could turn the lock without looking at what was outside or worrying that anyone would see her. She was almost certain she was in the Tower, because everything was very human. She and her bedfellow had lived here a long time.

The _existence_ of that bedfellow made Eris feel like she had travelled through time as well as space. Once, when she had first met Toland, she had had fantasies about him that looked something like this. They were unexpected and short-lived and deeply treasured fantasies, and they had changed nothing. Nothing had happened between them except a handful of tense conversations. Once, when he had drank Tincture of Queensfoil with Eriana, once, once outside Eriana’s apartment, when she had touched his face. And in the end he had given her the bond of emerald light and told her to be safe, and that had been the last time she had seen his eyes.

Maybe. Maybe. Why had Savathûn trapped her in something so pleasant? (Pleasant, yes, but her thoughts were racing. There must be more to discover here. There must be a trap)

She opened the door.

She stepped into a library. The full extent of the room could not be seen behind the corner of a wall up ahead. Bookshelves lined the walls. Weapons and artifacts glimmered in glass cases. All of the surfaces, glass, tile, and wood alike, were clean and free of dust.

The ceiling further along was glass as well, criss-crossed by silver support bars. This was the only way Eris could tell she was in the Tower. Above her, other parts of the immense construction stuck out like cliff edges. Birds circled beyond them. She could tell the day was bright because everything was fuzzy-edged and indistinct. Perhaps the candle in her room had been dimmer than it appeared; she was so used to her Hive vision being accustomed to the dark. Not for the first time, she regretted her inability to feel the Light, too. At this angle, she couldn’t see the Traveler or tell whether anything was different about its Light in the simulation. Would Savathûn be able to recreate it? Had she invented a new world, or dropped Eris into a real place that existed in a different fold of the multiverse?

Her musings ended as she focused on the _people_. Several Warlocks browsed near the corner of the room, pink cloaks falling so low they pooled on the floor. An Awoken in civilian clothes examined one of the objects inside a glass case.

Toland slouched over his long limbs, spider-like in a high-backed green chair.His head was bare, and although she could not see his eyes, she saw the short, uneven horns he and Eris had both grown as their implanted eyes spread Hive physiology through their bodies. She recognized him immediately by both face and by posture, even though it had been years since she had seen him. In her day, he was letters and pronouncements, disembodied and disincorporated. She wasn’t sure whether she knew him fully, or trusted him. She _liked_ him, more’s the pity, but … time felt like it was shifting, mixing who he had been before the Hellmouth expedition and who he had been after. Eris blinked and Toland was still there. Pinch yourself to find out if you’re dreaming, Eris remembered, and squeezed her wrist.

She took more steps out into the library.

Toland turned toward her without swinging his legs down off the arm of the chair. “You slept late.” He grinned, a thin flash of white teeth.

“I…” Eris began. She needed to ask him whether he knew what was going on. Was he real, or an illusion? “Are you…”

“Excuse me.” A Titan stood in the aisle next to Toland’s chair.

Eris turned to look at him at the same time as Toland did.

The Titan chuckled nervously. “They told me that was uncanny. I guess it is.”

“What stories have you heard, young defender?” Toland’s tone was lofty, as usual.

The Titan hesitated. She looked back and forth. Trying to meet all of their eyes. Eris had seen this particular maneuver many times. Every time she talked to someone, there was a moment of disconnect, of not knowing how to show they were paying attention to her. For a long time, she had tried to work on telling this moment of uncertainty from mis-trust. She believed that Guardians as a whole were good people. Sometimes they mocked her, though. Some did mistrust her.

And Toland had the same eyes she did. When she looked at Toland, there was no moment of uncertainty.

“Nothing,” the Titan said. “It’s nothing.”

Toland stood up. “Do not pretend to ignorance. You know how we were chosen.”

_Chosen._

The way Toland talked about the Hive still disturbed her. Chosen! They had been chosen for horror, chosen for loss! The Hive had claimed them, made them their own. But still, she loved their eyes, sometimes. Loved the new things she could see, the new emphasis on shadow. Blacks were deeper, greens more fluorescent, yellows pale. She, and Toland, existed in colors she could understand and name.

Nevertheless, she did not want to hear him rise to the Titan’s feeble curiosity. She glided along the edge of the library, looking at the shelves. None of the books were familiar, although she did not expect them to be. She had not spent a majority of her time in the Tower library, and thought that not even the most studious Warlocks did. The titles were in Roman or Cyrillic characters, separated by shelves. Behind her, she could hear Toland’s tone change from angry to cajoling, the way it always did. He always surrendered to the thing that was attacking him, and Eris always lived to fight another day by whatever means she could.

Perhaps today’s means were this: a small, pink crystal sat on the shelf between the spines of books. No other shelves held decorative items, so it seemed very out of place in the neatly organized stacks.

_What would Ikora do? What would Eriana do?_

Eris had seen this type of crystal before. Deep beneath the methane sea of the moon Titan, Savathûn had turned Guardians into crystal batteries that had looked like this. According to the Young Wolf’s report, the had been larger. The Young Wolf’s team had destroyed them, with regret for the people who had died to make them, but with the understanding that taking out each crystal sapped energy from Savathûn’s broods.

Eris was not armed. She reached for a knife at her side, but did not find one.

What she was about to do would surprise a lot of people, but so did most things she did. If that had stopped her in the past, she would never have come back to the Tower after living in the pit for three years.

She picked the crystal up. It weighed more than it appeared, straining against the muscles of her forearms. She hefted it a little and let it drop.

It smashed at her feet. Pink shards flew everywhere, but like most things saturated with Hive magic, it was impermanent, and dissolved into dust before it could cut her skin or skid across the floor. The smashing sound was suddenly cut off.

At first, nothing appeared to have changed. She looked around, suspicious that the change might be small or obscure. But when it started, there was no mistaking it. Toland began to dissolve. White light filled and replaced his form, then drifted away. As soon as his left arm started to dissolve he froze, as if trapped. Eris clutched her own arm as sympathetic prickles shot through her muscles. The Titan dissolved next. Eris took a deep breath.

White fog filled the room, then just as quickly disappeared. When it cleared, the shape of the library had changed. The architecture was more familiar to Eris now. This library was definitely not the place where she and Eriana had researched the Hive the first time, after Mare Imbrium, but it was similar enough that she thought she recognized some of the books. Class banners hung on the walls. Eris had not yet seen any libraries in the Tower that had been built after the Red War, so it was quite possible that she was in one of those. There was no bedroom just off this library, just a wide hallway leading outside. Candles were set on the floor.

Because the ceiling was now closed, covered by a brutalist ribbed ceiling, she could not see whether the Traveler was unchanged or not.

Again she wished she could sense the Light. If she could use it to get her bearings, whole new dimensions of understanding would open up without her even having to go into that hallway. But she would, as always, work with what she had.

As she stepped out she was again struck by the need to make sure that Brya was okay. Every time, she had to remind herself that Brya was not. Every time, she wondered whether that fruitless instinct itself would one day become reassuring.

It didn’t.

The hallway wound around industrially bare corridors and lead to a stairway. One flight down, decorated doors probably lead to other library floors or the homes of scholars and librarians. She passed these quickly.

Finally, many turns of the stair later, she found herself at the edge of the Tower, overlooking the city. She paused with her hand on the railing, not sure of what she was seeing.

The Traveler was not present. In its place over the city floated a translucent cocoon. White, gray, and green light floated over it, adding to a rainbow of soft colors cast by the clear daylight onto the clouds that skimmed its surface. It was as large as the Traveler, and as still. Inside the cocoon she could see the outline of a Hive worm, as large as the underwater beast on Titan. Eris recoiled. She could not tell whether the worm was alive. She had the inevitable feeling that she would in the course of this adventure find herself up there, clinging to the bottom of the worm’s mouth.

Did her Ahamkara bone charm still exist here? If she had that, she could at least calibrate this phenomenon against known energies—Hive, wish dragon, and Awoken energies.

The Tower itself was different too. With dawning horror, she saw the extent to which it was overgrown with barnacles and seaweed-like growths. Some streamed out from the upper stories. She gritted her teeth. She could not conjure her Ahamkara bone out of the air, and she could not turn back. She already knew there was nothing for her back there.

She moved forward into the covered area. The hallway was dark and clammy. She turned down the first lighted hallway. There were fewer growths here, and evidence of places where moss had been hacked away as if with a machete. The person in the room was the first familiar face she had seen in a long time. Even so, he was only familiar second-hand. The Young Wolf had told Eris, in many letters unanswered, about the goings-on at the Tower in the years after the Red War. This was the Drifter, an old Lightbearer here to give the Guardians a new game to play and to make some Motes of Darkness for himself. Although the currency he traded in was strange to her, she did not believe he was connected to the Hive except through oblique history with Dredgen Yor.

Although his name struck fear into some Guardians, Eris could not help but think of Dredgen Yor’s fall as somewhat … old fashioned. He had succumbed to the Hive before their royal family had even revealed its machinations. Compared to Savathûn, he was a child.

But this Drifter was familiar. And he, like Eris, also had quirks that set the Guardians talking. Because of this, she was even less worried that he would find her off-putting or refuse to talk to her.

“Hey,” the Drifter said, pushing off the railing behind him with an exaggerated movement. “How about some Gambit?”

“You must answer my questions,” Eris said.

The Drifter laughed. “Straightforward, aren’t you? Wait, I haven’t seen you around before, but somehow that face is mighty familiar.”

 _That face?_ She immediately assumed that he was talking about her Hive eyes, not the shape of mouth, jaw, and chin that had been left to her after her transformation.

“Why does the Tower look like this?” Eris asked.

“Because the great worm in the sky wanted it to. Who’s asking?”

“Myself.”

“No, I don’t think so.” He stepped closer. He was not much taller than Eris, but carried an air of menace.

Eris was well-versed in weaponizing the truth. “Someone who has seen a world not like this one. Does that appeal to you or haunt you?”

Drifter laughed. “Sister, I’ve seen worlds not like this one too. Sure, I was raised up by the worm, same as any of us. But I didn’t bow right away to its demands! Fight for an army we don’t even understand? Send sacrifices to the moon, like some kind of tithe to a terrible master? No thank you. I took off to a world cold as ice, saw strange things there that’ll kill your deathless cells from fear. But what they don’t tell you right away is that immortality isn’t an option. It isn’t a gift. It’s a trap.”

Seemingly satisfied with his speech, he leaned against the railing again. “But you know that. You look like a smart one.”

_What a con. Instead of asking me what I believe, he makes it sound like he assumes no sane person could believe anything other than what he already said._

Her estimation of how much danger he posed increased. But the fact remained that, not being of this world, she had very little to lose when it came to questioning the strange underpinnings of it.

“I am not constrained by that worm,” Eris said. “I bring its death … if death has not come upon it already.”

“Hard to tell, isn’t it? People aren’t sure whether it got more dead or more alive after Ghaul tried to take its power.”

“What stopped him?”

The Drifter laughed. “You all did. The Guardians and your Spirits, fighting on the noble side of the krill your conquerers. Now, I ain’t here to go throw rocks at Savathûn’s doorstep. But I don’t see how you all can stand to be so subservient!”

“Savathûn…” Eris looked down at the metal walkway beneath her feet.

“So you do know the old witch. I was beginning to think you were from … far out of town.”

Eris snapped her gaze back to him. “And what if I am?” She demanded. “Will you refuse me? You have already given me enough. Answer one more question.”

The Drifter was taken aback. He raised his hands. “Whatever, friend. I’m just giving Guardians an opportunity, here. It’s up to them whether they take it.”

“This is not about your foolish Gambit. You think you command dark powers, when you do not even know what true power is.” Eris caught herself. So, she had had some lingering bitterness about the Drifter. Perhaps it was also about what Dredgen Yor had been, how he had wanted to use the Hive for his own, very human, ambition. He couldn’t even be clear-sighted enough to understand that he could have tried to topple the Osmium dynasty in its infancy. He couldn’t even … Eris pulled herself back.

“How long as the Tower been like this?” Eris said.

“So long as there’s been a Tower,” the Drifter drawled.

“And how long is that?”

“Since the latest in the line of Dark Ages, I suppose.”

“When did the worm arrive?” Eris tried to keep her teeth from baring.

“The worm has always been there.” For the first time, the Drifter looked confused.

That confirmed it. She had suspected the worm was the catalyst. The worm had come instead of the Traveler. Where was the Traveler? Fundament? No— if it was there, the Hive would still be the krill, a peaceful people preyed upon by nearly everything else in the teeming solar system they called home. Had the Traveler been trapped somewhere? Did it even exist?

Eris took a deep breath and focused her racing thoughts. “Thank you for your information.”

“Right.” The Drifter made the word into at least three syllables. “You look like an observant one. Did you ever play Gambit? I’m sure I’d remember a canny Guardian like yourself.”

Best meet Drifter’s observant truths with an observant truth of her own. She was not totally without ego.

“You are right to distrust the worms, but not right to think yourself outside their influence,” she said.

His lips curled. She could not decide whether he was ugly or handsome, or whether there was some cruelty evident on his face, on his thin, chapped lips and the dark circles under his bright eyes. Maybe she only thought of him this way because she knew his reputation. No matter what else was true about the universe she found herself in, she suspected that the swirling vat of black-and-white energy behind him was still filled with the product of Motes of Darkness.

“You come back if you ever want to make some glimmer,” Drifter said, and moved away. Eris recognized the dismissal for what it was. She had not exactly made an enemy today, but she did not think she had made a friend either. It would be good for her to remember that the Drifter did not trust the worm that ruled this tower any more than he trusted the Traveler that hung over the City Eris knew.

It was with a heavy heart that she ascended to the next level of the Tower, unsure what she might see. Did the Vanguard exist here? Had the Hive destroyed them? Or did they exist as a puppet state, doing the worm’s bidding? As soon as she stepped back into the light, she looked up for the moon.

It was mid-afternoon, too early to see the Earth’s celestial little sister.

Guardians up here seemed to be living normal lives in the shadow of the dead-and-alive worm. People hurried to and fro. Some were deep in conversation with … Ghosts. They should have been Ghosts. Eris’ eyes almost shied away from realizing why the Drifter had appended his diatribe about Guardians with the word “Spirits”. Beside each Guardian floated a little puff of substance, like a head of dandelion seeds. Green light glowed softly from inside each one. She recognized that light as the same kind of Hive magic wizards used to cast their spells and enhance their vision with biologically manipulated bands and ranks of eyes.

This was a Tower that had been taken over by the Hive.

And no one seemed to care.

Civilians were here too, talking among themselves. People laughed from atop a ramen shop’s bar stools. Paying only some attention, they watched something on a screen. When she looked toward them they moved shoulders and shifted backs to hide the images.

She slowed, making intentional space to take in the strangeness. Coral grew out from walls. Seed-puff Spirits floated where Ghosts should have been. They were cute like Shanks—absurdly cute for something dangerous.

“Happy tithe,” someone muttered. A chill ran up Eris’ spine and pulled at her shoulders. The words came from a blue-eyed Exo, who performed an obvious double-take at the sight of her eyes. This rippled out, until the crowd standing in the hall by the ramen stand all stood quiet and nervous in front of her.

Eris kept walking. This was not too dissimilar than the stares she had often endured when she had first returned to the Hellmouth. Other elements of it did not follow. If the Hive had some sort of alliance with the Tower here and now, why would the sight of her eyes create this much horror? She walked faster, trying to put the shadow of the awning and the crowd behind her.

As soon as Eris stepped into the wide thoroughfare, she saw Ikora standing under an awning near the edge of the Tower. Eris hurried toward her. Pigeons flapped away from the railing with a cacophony of wings, cooing in alarm as Eris came nearer. The babble of the Tower denizens faded into a background hum occasionally cut by a shout from a news crier.

“Eris!” Ikora recognized her immediately. A wave of relief swept over Eris, following by one of fear. Who did Ikora believe her to be? What had Eris’ fate been in a world where the Hive had won?

“Ikora. There is something of great importance—“

“Please, friend. You always work so hard. Catch your breath.” As always, Ikora stood like a statue, her hands clasped in front of her. Eris well knew that Ikora could reach forward for a touch just as easily, or slam a fist into an enemy with bone-breaking strength. Everything she did, she did completely. Right now, she was completely the perfect image of a serene Warlock Vanguard, hurricane within and harmony without.

“I do not want to cause a panic.” Eris lowered her voice and moved closer. Ikora smelled like hazelnut and ozone. “But I must learn what has happened here.”

“Happened to what, exactly?” Ikora said.

Eris’ agitation was no where near close to beginning to break through Ikora’s serene poise. Not that Eris wanted it to, not exactly. But no one was reactive with as much horror as they should! There was a worm hanging in the sky, ready to open the cocoon and devour them all!

But did anyone _ever_ react with as much horror as Eris felt? Maybe it was simply a trait of hers, to see horror more clearly than others.

It was something else her grafted, mutable eyes gave her.

“That worm should not be here,” Eris hissed. “I do not know what has been done to the Traveler, or whether it never existed at all.”

“Eris…”

““But I tell you, this is some trick of Savathûn’s.”

“Of course it is!”

Ikora’s warm assent stopped Eris mid-proclamation.

“I think, perhaps, this is something we should talk about in private,” Ikora said. “Would you mind coming with me?”

“No. Lead on. But we must be quick!”

Ikora walked with her up the hallway, up the stairs, and into a sitting room with wicker furniture and thick walls. Even in this room, there was evidence of Hive influence in the decor; a many-spiked sigil on the ceiling, green hangings on the walls. “This was once the Speaker’s chamber,” Ikora said. “Until she was killed in the Red War.” Ikora sat down.

Eris did not. She could not stand to put down her guard even in the slightest. “Why do you speak so calmly of Savathûn’s deceit?”

“Because it is not deceit.” Ikora narrowed her eyes. “Eris, I have not seen you in many years. I feel more has changed than I know.”

“Perhaps I am not the Eris you knew,” Eris said. “I was dropped here, through some method unknown to myself. This Tower is not the place I know. The Hive should not have taken it over like this.”

Ikora spoke slowly, pronouncing every word with care. “I know that Savathûn can create illusions. I know she has shown us other worlds, and confused us to further her own gain. Not to mention to tithe. But we cannot speak of this in public. I don’t know whether even the other Vanguards agree with my concerns.”

“What tithe? Are you saying Savathûn rules here?”

“She is just the latest in a long line of Hive rulers.” Ikora turned away. “Or perhaps they were all her, wearing different faces. We have speculated many things. But nevertheless, we must pay the tithe. Six healthy Guardians every year, disappeared into the Moon so that the Hive do not level our Last City. It has been this way for hundreds of years. Do you come from a place where this is not true?”

“Yes! We are protected by the Traveler, by …” Eris gestured outward unable to speak of the breadth of the changes the Traveler had wrought in the Solar System before she had been reborn. What were the other planets like now that they had been Hive-formed instead of terraformed? “The Hive are just one of the many enemies we face, but they have not won. They do not own us like this.” Eris started to pace.

To Ikora’s credit, Ikora did not try to stop Eris’ anger by presenting comforting words.

“Astounding…” Ikora’s eyes were wide. She examined Eris as if Eris was an interesting specimen. Eris wondered whether she was as likely to dissect her.

“But what can we do about it? How can we fight, and keep Guardians from being taken?”

“I’m sorry, but we can’t.”

“What? This is not like you! You would not refuse to fight!”

“I have tried in the past, Eris, but the Hive is too large. Their agents are in the Tower, everywhere around the City, across the Earth, on the Moon. And they give us our power. Although Ophiuchus and I are not close…”

That was an understatement, Eris knew.

“I treasure her. And she was given to me by the worm, when I was risen.”

Eris was tempted to ask which worm it was that had taken the place of the Traveler, but right now it wasn’t essential to know. She didn’t have time to ask questions for curiosity’s sake.

“When will Guardians next be sacrificed to the Hive?”

Ikora looked down. “Today. They are preparing on the moon now.”

“I cannot believe you permit this!”

“The other Vanguard…”

“Excuses!” Eris began to pace. As she paced, Eris noticed another pink crystal. This one was also hidden and out of place, sitting on its side underneath the chair where Eris might have sat if she had been more comfortable. She kicked it out from under the chair. Melodic chiming sounds emerged as it rolled across the floor.

“Eris, perhaps you’re right,” Ikora began to say, still looking at her clasped hands. “I have listened to the arguments from the other Vanguard too long. I have been convinced to allow something terrible to happen. A few should not be intentionally sacrificed to save the many! We can change this somehow, but I need to explain to you—”

 _No more explanations_ , Eris thought. She was not angry at Ikora. The Vanguard’s cold shell was beginning to crack. But Eris could not hesitate when she had a solution right in front of her.

She stamped down on the crystal.

At the first stomp it did not shatter. It was thick enough that her boot only cracked it. But the thin, white line threading through the pink was proof that her weight could destroy it. She brought her foot down onto it again. This time, the center opened up and pink-white dust scattered around.

The world turned into fog.


	2. Chapter 2

_But I have given you perfect worlds. Both are healthy. Both have equilibrium within themselves. You have rejected two. How many more gifts must I give you before you accept one?_

This time, a new world had not spread out in front of Eris. Fog moved all around her. There would have been no way to tell whether or not she was standing on flat ground if she could not feel a surface under the soles of her feet. The voice echoed from everywhere, or from inside her mind. She experimentally moved her arms, then clawed into the fog to try to get out.

The deep voice came out of the gray. Eris had heard it before, in the throne room, and a thin echo of it in transmissions spiked onto the Moon and Io and Saturn. Savathûn.

 _You are tenacious. That is all you are, you know? You are not strong, or fast, or even immortal. You are not smart, or stealthy, or heavily shielded. All you have is this silly notion that putting one foot in front of another_ means _something._

 _“_ It does mean something,” Eris said.

_Why?_

“Because it proves itself. One step is one step. The goal is not the progress; the progress is the progress.”

_But you cannot change the place you are in. I will place you in world after world._

“Why am I entertaining this conversation?” Eris shouted. “You are the queen of deception. That is the only definition I need right now. You speak only lies!”

_Behold my truth._

The fog cleared. Eris saw the Hellmouth, where a line of Guardians walked toward the gray edge of a cliff. Floating wizards flanked them. Screams, tuned in such a way that Eris knew they sounded like a dirge to the Hive, echoed. Unlike the changed colors her Hive eyes granted her, Eris could still not hear those screams as music.

 _No, only Toland hears them_ , Savathûn muttered.

“Get out of my head!”

_You want to see all. Your spirit scans the universe. I am part of that universe. You cannot help but see me in every waking moment._

“I am not like Toland. I touch the ascendant plane in order to protect people, not to listen to you!”

_Toland listens to me. Sometimes, he does, even though he also resists. I thought you would understand my very first message to you, but you did not. Listen well, now. I can give him to you. I can give you many iterations of him, more and less broken._

Eris thought of the empty side of the bed in the library that did not exist.

“I will free these Guardians,” Eris said. “The rest I will sort out myself.”

Savathûn did not speak another word, but Eris had the impression that she scoffed. Eris shrugged off the psychic dismissal. More difficult was shrugging off the scene before her. One by one, the Guardians threw themselves into the Hellmouth not to conquer, but to die.

 _They do this for their people,_ Savathûn said. _The vendors in the Tower? The children in the streets of the Last City? Guardians exist only because I permit them to exist. Humans must fight. It is part of their nature, and it is nature they carried into their evolution into the Awoken and programmed into the Exos they created. Simply to try to wipe out humanity would just make them fight harder. So it is also with the Eliksni. So I have made a bargain with them. I do not save them, but I save them just enough, and in turn …_

The last of the Guardians, a Hunter, stepped over the edge. He did not scream as he fell.

_Ikora knows about this. She sees it as an acceptable loss._

_No_. Eris knew this was wrong. She struggled to remind herself that, on top of all of her moral qualms about Ikora right now, she was also in a vision inside a vision. None of this was real, except for Eris herself and for Savathûn. Savathûn wanted to teach Eris some kind of twisted lesson, or simply keep her out of commission. Until Eris learned it, Savathûn would not free her from visions of different possible timelines. Eris’ real goal was not to convince Ikora to stop this twisted bargain, but to figure out what it _symbolized_.

Savathûn had already said she believed Eris would give up.

So the key was not to give up. The result would be the same—Eris needed to change Ikora’s mind—but her motivation was different, and that mattered to the constructed universe she inhabited. Eris shook her head, confused and tired, but determined.

Perhaps Savathûn saw this as a sign of Eris giving up. Perhaps, Eris realized with some shock, Eris’ confusion had given Savathûn all of the energy she needed for now.

The fog faded.

The world snapped back into place. Eris lost time and then she was back in the dead Speaker’s sanctum, the lights too strong. Ikora was rising from her wicker chair, her eyes wide. Eris flinched away from the bright light and the white latticework walls.

“Did you see that?” Eris panted, struggling to catch her breath.

“You collapsed.”

“Do not touch me.” Eris said the words before she could decide whether they were polite or not. It was imminently important that Ikora know touching her would have _consequences_ , and that outweighed any politeness. But she saw the hesitation in Ikora’s eyes as the Vanguard eased away from her.

“It will take time for me to recover from that touch … time I do not have,” Eris said.

Ikora’s shoulders lowered.

In the split-second afterward, Eris wondered why she was apologizing to _this_ Ikora, the one who sold her Guardians to Savathûn for clemency. It was because she owed that respect to _her_ Ikora, of course. Eris straightened up, opening and closing her fists to remind herself that she still even had a body. “I received a message from your queen.” Eris grimaced. “From Savathûn herself.”

Ikora sat back down. Now Eris did take the seat across from her, holding on to the curved, wicker arm as if it would keep her from drowning.

“I’ve been giving what you said some consideration.” Ikora’s tone was grave. She steepled her fingers.

 _As have I_ , Eris thought and did not say.

“It has been too long that I have been willing to hide in theory, to hide behind what my fellow Vanguards say, in order to pretend that we do this for the greater good. But it would take decades, centuries, for them to unlearn the traditions of the Tower,” Ikora said.

It was hard for Eris to wrap her head around the idea that, for Ikora, this arrangement, this parasitism, between the Hive and humanity had existed for thousands of years. It would be for this false Ikora as if Eris had appeared in the Tower one day and demanded that humanity destroy the Traveler.

Well, certainly a few Guardians and civilians would be in support of that idea.

“Surely you must be able to persuade Zavala that the Witch-Queen has made a terrible breach in the walls,” Eris said, trying to rein in her impatience. Even if she was talking to a construct, a dream, she was still talking to Ikora … right?

“He believes she patches gaps that would otherwise be open.”

“And for the Hunters—does the Witch-Queen not restrict what you can know? Where you can go? The Moon is ours, Ikora. It always has been.” Eris did not know whether Cayde-6 still lived in this world. This path of reasoning would work regardless. She felt her conviction was getting through to Ikora.

“There are always some mysteries in the world,” Ikora said, looking down at her own hands. “We cannot invade fortresses to find all of them…”

“Savathûn’s fortress is not a mystery through natural means. It is a secret kept by someone who wishes to hold all the power in the universe for herself. She has defanged humanity, and you comfortably accept this disfigurement!”

“For the sake of peace one day…”

“One day? Now you see how you have thought yourself in circles to justify atrocities today. And what will you do when she asks the fireteam that throws themselves into the Pit to be yours?”

Ikora paused. “You’re right. We’ve all hid behind different walls in order not to think of that,” Ikora said, “But it will not be a job which is complete in one step, and it will not be easy. You must open up a gap in Savathûn’s fortress on the moon. And you must do it with an eye for minimal possible reprisal against the Tower.”

Eris nodded. “I can reach the moon on my own. But surely she is well-fortified. Guardians will need to go with me. It must be a coordinated strike, perhaps the scale of Mare Imbrium.” Perhaps she was asking too much. She would ask anyway.

“There is another option. A back way in.”

Eris gave a sigh of relief. Her feelings were so obvious that Ikora smiled in response.

“I know how you like to work,” Ikora said.

The statement could have been ominous coming from an Ikora from an alternate world, but Eris took it as a comfort.

“I am intended to meet the Hive emissary in … about 15 minutes. You will be there instead of me. How to convince him to take you to the Moon is up to you, although I can certainly offer suggestions.”

“What is his role? Simply a messenger, or does he take Guardians to the slaughter?”

“Oh.” Ikora raised an eyebrow. “I am surprised you don’t know. But if you did not know of Savathûn either … perhaps I should not be. I apologize.”

Eris shook her head. “No offense taken.” _Some_ _Warlocks are so sensitive to the fact that implying ignorance might offend others, while others want to create that exact sensation on purpose._ The same was true of everyone, she supposed, but everyone was not the symbolic ideal of their class the way Ikora was intended to be.

“The emissary comes to renew our pact after the sacrifice is done. A symbolic messenger,” Ikora said. “In fact, you …might know him. Toland the Shattered.”

 _Again._ Eris felt cold. In the first world she had visited, he had remembered her but not known she was from another universe. He traveled through dimensions as a matter of course—if anyone else would have been thrown into this mess by Savathûn for helping Eris with her original plan to throw the queen off her throne, it might be him. Or he might find some way to bridge the different worlds. Or, he might, like Ikora and the Toland in the Tower library, know nothing of Eris’ plight at all, and simply be a puppet performed by the Witch-Queen.

“The infamous Warlock,” Eris said, to buy herself time. “He gave himself to the Hive.”

“He was an ally of yours for a short time, if I remember correctly.”

“I do not know. My history here is not my history.” _What had it been? If Mare Imbrium had never happened, where…_ “Is Eriana-3 alive?”

This time, Ikora successfully masked her surprise or curiosity about Eris’ questions, not even raising that eyebrow.

“Yes, she’s alive. She lives in the Tower with her partner.”

 _“Wei_ is alive?” Emotion welled up in Eris’ throat. In this terrible world, where the Moon took six Guardians every year, Eriana and Wei were living in comfort, and Toland was alive, doing what sounded like a task for which he was ideally suited. Was there an Eris here? Was she _happy_?

Eris shook her head. This was an _illusion_ , she insisted to herself. There had never been an Eris here before she arrived, because this had never been a reality before she arrived. Savathûn herself had all but admitted that she had created it to be a tempting dream. Perhaps Savathûn also wanted to force her to make a choice, or to wonder whether cruelty was always necessary for happiness, or …

She took a deep breath and met Ikora’s eyes. “I am sorry. They would not want the world to be this way if they knew another one. I go for them, as much as for myself.”

“You’ll need to go soon, if you’re going,” Ikora said. “The emissary meets me in the garden several floors above this one. Take the stairs above the hangar. You will find it marked with a green flag. The door is open. The path does not divert, but the climb is long. Hurry, or you won’t get there until the other Vanguard are already present.”

“Yes.” Eris stood and made for the door. “Thank you. Be vigilant. Savathûn’s trickery is subtle.”

Ikora met her eyes, one hand on the door. “I know you want to see Eriana and Wei, Eris. I know your mission takes you elsewhere. But I hear hesitation in you. Do not always hesitate to ask for what you want.”

She was right, as usual. Eris had rearranged her words in her mind to avoid saying _I want to see them._ Pronouncements were so much easier than desires. She had asked for a team to besiege the Moon, but that had not been for her, personally. It had been for the Earth. Personal wants were more difficult.

_Again, arguing with a dream._

Eris nodded, and hurried toward the garden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter than average, and a more talky one. One of the reasons I stopped writing the previous version of this story is because I was stuck on a chapter like this: Eris introducing herself to the alternate Vanguard and trying to convince them to let her help them. The story was not personal enough to Eris. She did not have enough to lose. The stakes were unclear, and all of that made creating the alternate Vanguard rather boring. (Even if I did have charts and charts, now mostly lost, of how exactly the entire Fundament ended up at Earth instead of the Traveler and how that affected the Fallen and the Awoken.)


	3. Chapter 3

As she crossed the hangar on the way to the room where she would meet the Hive emissary, Eris powerfully wished that she had gone to see Eriana and Wei Ning instead. If only to see them, for a minute, instead of having to worry about this mission … lies, all of it! Tension curled her hands into fists. She could put a knife through every inch of this place and never scratch Savathûn’s hide, and meanwhile the Witch-Queen would be sitting back in her throne, satisfied that Eris was engaging with her deception. She would have defeated Eris without lifting a finger in combat. Of course, she of all of the Osmium King’s children had for her last defense a nigh-endless maze. Eris knew more than enough of the Books of Sorrow to know that this was Savathûn’s strength.

Nevertheless, there was something fascinating and comforting about this alternate Tower, as there had been about the previous one. On her way to the catwalks of the hangar, she saw an Eliksni standing under a red awning threaded with gold. He carried swords in two of his four arms, and wore the cloak that had once belonged to Andal Brask over golden armor on his right side. One of the bright green, dandelion-tuft Spirits which were not Ghosts floated next to him. She felt curiosity draw her toward him, but resisted it. Ikora had implied it would do no good for the other Vanguard to be there when she talked to the emissary.

What _would_ she say to convince him? Even though Ikora had told her the emissary was what Toland had become, Eris had trouble imagining him as the person she had known. He would be so different in a role where he had _responsibility._ Wouldn’t he? He wasn’t exactly diplomatic. But he would certainly hold up the Hive’s standards.

Her footsteps rang on the metal steps as she ascended. The catwalks up here looked like a maze, but the green banner was easy to find. The many-spiked symbol of the Hive hung above the hangar. That, Eris could not take comfort in.

She ascended many stairs. Ikora had not been exaggerating about the height. It was perhaps eight floors before Eris reached a door, her legs aching. She wondered what parts of the Tower existed, hidden, on either side of her. Were the walls filled with maintenance and workings, such as pipes, and ducts? Or were there living quarters there, surrounding the stairwell but without access to it?

Neither anything along the way nor the elegant doorway itself seemed to have any security measures. The door was scuffed, red metal underneath, but buried in flaking filigree. It was carved into a a human-made design, if Eris had to guess, with curving ends and natural, leaflike shapes. Perhaps a little bit of rebellion? Either that, or Hive and human co-existing was simply not remarkable here.

She pushed open the door.

Earthling plants and alien life mingled in this garden. Terraced steps lead up to a wide circle in the center, with two wide concentric circles of garden beds filling the remaining space. Plants spilled onto the narrow pathways and steps. The ceiling of the round garden was glass, threaded with delicate metal that, from Eris’ vantage point well below it, looked spiderweb-thin and hardly capable of holding up the thick Tower walls. Without those plain walls, she might have thought she was transported to the Dreaming City or a new planet entirely.

The humid air clung to Eris’ skin. After she had destroyed the first crystal she had found, her old field-weave clothes had returned to her. The armored vest and skirt, and the bone shoulder plates and gauntlets, all reassured her of a degree of safety even as sweat gathered beneath them. When it came to what was real and what was not, whatever the Witch-Queen had ordained and what would be true rebellion against her, Eris would approach this alter the same no matter what: with borrowed clothes, bound hands, and her head high.

Alter, yes. There was an impression of holiness in the place, although no marks festooned its walls and nothing sat at the top of the shallow stairs. _Toland had always been_ religious _, hadn’t he? Wanting to commune so badly with the forces above and around him, wanting to give himself to them._ His fanaticism had repelled and attracted her at the same time. When she saw this room as an alter, it removed any desire she had for reverence. But it also evoked _him_ , a prickling anticipation for sight that _would_ transform the garden into a sanctuary, the Earth into just half the squares on an invisible chessboard. She wanted to see through Toland’s eyes a faith she could not come near on her own.

Ikora had not told her what ritual to perform here, only that the emissary would arrive soon. Eris practically stumbled up the stairs. The green plants surrounded her in thousands of shades.

She waited, folding her arms to keep from fidgeting. With no way to count time, she examined the plants. Her mind was drifting when a pale column of green light appeared in the room. She stepped backward, not wanting to be in the midst of the transmat sigil’s destination. She had traveled this way enough times, and had never hoped for someone to be standing in the way.

The emissary appeared in a pillar of black smoke. Three green eyes burned through it. Seconds later, the rest of him was revealed; human indeed, and dressed none too differently from a Guardian. Bone charms and black armor-weave hugged Toland’s thin hips. A black cowl hung loose around his shoulders. Because Eris had already seen him in the library, his face was a lesser shock.

He did not carry any weapon she could see, although the black stone pitons on his bandoleer could easily have been mistaken for throwing knives.

Toland smiled. He waited a moment to speak, judging the amount of aloof knowledge to inject into his tone. “So, they sent me _this Guardian._ ”

“I am not a Guardian,” Eris said. She would insist on her owning her own disfigurement.

Toland tipped his head. “Are you not?” He sniffed loudly. “No Spirit …” He reached for the space over her left shoulder, where a Ghost might hang.

“But you do know who I am.”

“Of course, dearest Eris.” Toland took two steps closer, the footfalls clicking in the muffled quiet of the plant-filled room. “It has been a long time, since we last spoke across the worlds. I would send you one thousand letters on paper that would never crumble with time. But you do not answer them.” He tipped his head.

The air felt even more cloying now. The black fog of his arrival had faded, but a new fog had risen behind Eris’ eyes. She had not expected this Toland to know her, to stand so close, to want her. In another time, she might have moved closer. Now, she wanted to keep him away at the same time as she indulged in fantasies. If he had just stood as close as he once had in the Last City, she could cup his cheek in her hand and run her fingers up to the place where the chitin rooted in his skin.

_No._

“I am not the Eris you remember,” she said, her voice clear and loud. She insisted on sounding certain of herself.

“Nor are you the Vanguard. I expect you haven’t told them you will be here when they step through that door in a few minutes.”

 _Should she tell him Ikora sent her? No._ She needed to be direct. If this world worked on dream-logic, there was no more harm in being direct than in stalling. If the Witch-Queen was using this time to stop Eris in the real world, there was _infinite_ harm in stalling.

“I need to get to the Witch-Queen’s keep,” Eris said. “And I need to know whether you remember who I really am.”

“There are rituals even for betrayal,” Toland intoned.

_Of course there are._

“You do not have a Spirit either,” Eris guessed.

For a moment, Toland looked confused. He dipped his head, casting his three-eyed gaze toward the floor. “Should I? Did I?”

“You had something else.”

Toland shook his head. “The memory pushes at me … and I am so used to telling you the truth. But why do you distract me this way from the Witch-Queen’s glory? _She_ is the reason I am here.”

The idea that he was choosing between Eris and Savathûn curdled her stomach. Perhaps he pined for Savathûn the way he pined for her. It would only make his madness more compelling.

“You remember something other than this world,” Eris said. “What ritual do you perform with the Vanguard here? Doesn’t it feel thin? Cruel? Petty? Your ambition took you far … but in the end, you only became a servant.”

“Is it not noble to serve?”

“Not this master,” Eris said.

Toland shook his head.

_Don’t let him distract you. I see glimmers of who he once was, but I’m still not sure. And I need to convince him to take me to the Moon._

“You have some loyalty to me, Toland the Shattered. I can hear it in your voice.” This was a lie, but also a truth. She _knew_. _Dearest Eris_ , the letters said. Eris herself was an intrepid researcher, a witch who could break dimensions at her will, a warrior whose aging body still remembered the skills with which she had killed dragons. All of this, and she also knew that Toland’s connection to her gave her power over him. She could make him do what she wanted, and at this very moment, that would help her find a way out of Savathûn’s maze. “Show me the ritual, before the Vanguard arrive.”

He nodded. His eyes closed for a moment before opening even brighter than before. He began to chant, the hoarse sounds seeming too alien to come out of his mouth. His eyes squeezed almost closed, and between that and the twitches at the corner of his mouth she wondered whether the song hurt him.

As she had hoped, it conjured energy she could use. She reached forward and congealed a wisp of green magic out of the air. With two quick movements she flung gouts of it toward his third eye and toward his heart. This was a spell to break spells. She had not had the necessary raw materials for it before, but now he had brought them to her. He was also the first person who had given her any hint that he might remember who she really was. It made sense that Savathûn would want to trap him too. He had not been with Eris when she had confronted the Witch-Queen, but he had contributed his knowledge. He was the other most dangerous person in the world to Savathûn, if he could just be persuaded to turn against her.

“You left the Tower when Ghaul invaded!” Toland shouted. Eris stopped. Toland gasped and folded over. Eris stepped back so that there was no chance of him touching her as the memories wracked him.

“Yes,” she muttered gently.

He patted at his clothes, tugged the bone pitons. “What is this?”

“Tell me what you remember.”

He fell to his knees. “I am the emissary. I walk her halls. I miss … “

“What do you miss?” Eris kept her own voice steady. It hurt her to see him half-formed, but she needed to remain in control here in case Savathûn’s spell took him back.

“I cannot say!”

“ _Tell me what you remember_ ,” she demanded.

“Bold wanderers, you do not know the paths on which you tread!” Toland reached out across the floor, then tried to claw into it. “We have always been captives. We have always imagined ourselves the writer instead of the story, but it is imagination—“

“We have not always been Savathûn’s captives. Remember. You exist in the Ascendant Plane. You left us when we raided Crota’s fortress. We send letters to each other. I work for the Tower and I work for Mara Sov. This … thing, this worm in the sky, is not natural.”

Toland shuddered. She couldn’t see his face now, just the fall of black hair. Small horns like hers dotted the back of his head. He must have dusted the flakes of the scabs off his shoulders, Eris idly imagined. Her chitin horns usually bled and scabbed where they met the skin, and she had to attend to the flakes every other day.

“Yes. I send you letters, and you do not reply to them,” Toland said. “The Guardians visit me with Ghosts at their shoulders.”

“Yes.” Eris looked around for a pink crystal. Maybe that was a glimpse of pink in the garden. Meanwhile, she seemed to have broken Toland. He huddled in the center of the circle. There must not be much time left until Zavala and the Eliksni Hunter would open the door behind her. Maybe this world’s Ikora was trying to stop them right now, covering for Eris.

“I think I understand,” Toland said, muffled. “But it hurts. She does not want me to know this.”

Eris kicked through beautiful leaves, scattering dirt onto the immaculate path between the garden beds. The pink crystal sat there like an egg in a nest, its thick end buried in rich soil.

The door opened. Behind the filigreed gate stood Commander Zavala and the gold-armored Eliksni Hunter.

As they passed through the opening, Eris saw that Ikora had been standing behind them all along. Eris could not tell from Ikora’s expression whether she was serene or furious, whether she had tried to convince the other Vanguard not to come here, or whether she had betrayed Eris.

Toland was shivering. Nevertheless, he stood, shaken by how much he remembered. Eris hoped but could not be sure how much of his real memories he had regained.

“You see the proof before you.” Ikora’s voice boomed. “Eris has no spirit. She is not the Eris who once lived here.”

Zavala glowered at Toland. “And what is the emissary’s role in this?”

“My work has always been to acknowledge to you that your dead will serve,” Toland said, his voice clipped and stronger now than it had been just seconds before. _Good_ , Eris thought. _Maybe he will not give anything away. Or maybe the memories have been lost to him again._

Zavala nodded. It appalled Eris that he, the one of the three Vanguard she knew who had taken the hardest stance against threats from outside the Last City, was his typical stoic self in the face of a world where Earth had been taken over by the Hive. He should have been better!

_It isn’t real. This is a world Savathûn created for me, to trap and befuddle me. Her estimation of my allies does not have to fit with who they are._

“Ikora!” Eris called. “Heed my words. Remember how many worlds are at stake.” It hurt her head to think about. She would convince a false Ikora to help her by making the false Ikora think that alternate worlds like this one were real—and perhaps they were, but the last place Eris had been was the throne room of the Witch-Queen, and Eris half suspected she herself was still trapped there. Regardless, Eris’ _own_ world was real. If it was not, all definitions were well and truly sundered from their meanings.

The Eliksni Hunter stepped forward. His voice burbled like Variks’, but he spoke in a language Eris understood. “You put us all at risk. Listen, friends.” He gestured with two arms at the Vanguard and opened to them pleadingly, turning away from Eris and Toland. “This arrangement we have with the Hive has lasted us thousands of years. Because of it, children can grow up safely in the Last City, in the shadow of Eir.”

“Listen to yourself, Mithrax.” Ikora stepped forward. “Talking around this as if we can sanitize this. Eris woke me up as if from a dream. Those Guardians…” She gestured upward. “Would you be so willing to trade them if you had to look into their eyes?”

“Would you have us send thousands of soldiers instead of six willing patriots?” Mithrax lowered his hands, clearly try to appear reasonable.

“This emissary is in on it,” Zavala said. Instead of metal plate armor, he wore slabs of chitin which looked like thin, overlapping sheets of metal. As with Ikora, nothing about his personal appearance had changed, which made his presence in this dystopian world even more jarring. A craggy face etched with frown lines was in contrast to the delicate silver tracery of the Awoken skin patterns that swirled across his blue skin. “His silence speaks volumes.”

Eris almost laughed. So, the only thing they needed to know about Toland to tell that something was wrong was that he wasn’t monologuing at them! As humorous as it was, it made sense. Out of the corners of her eyes she saw Toland lift his head and sneer in response. She became keenly aware of the fact that there was only one way in or out of this room, that the long stairway might insulate the sound of any screams, that the Vanguard held the power to level cities in their hands.

 _Enough of this. There is no moral victory to be won here._ Savathûn’s crystals were holding her dream worlds together, and Eris had one close enough to grab. She wrenched it out of the ground. It resisted a little, the end having been pressed into the dirt like a strange bulb, but when Eris pulled hard enough it came out, shedding rich, black dirt. Everyone looked at her.

She threw the crystal across the room. It hit the top step and bounced. A white crack opened in its side. It ricocheted off the stairs toward the wall. When it hit, Eris had a fraction of a second to see the blue-white interior, jagged and chalky, before the world went white as if she stood at the center of an explosion.

This time, she knew she lost time only because the Vanguard were gone. The rest of the room seemed not to have changed. Toland still stood one step down from the center, clad in black and bone, with his back to her.

He spun to face her. “Do you remember?” The decorations on his clothes were the same. So, the world had not changed much. Perhaps Savathûn’s imaginary worlds were becoming more stable. Each time Eris had destroyed a crystal, her surroundings had changed less. At least this time they had changed in exactly the way that would best keep her out of danger.

“Yes,” she said. “Do you?”

“Yes. I remember two things. Both worlds. She … buried me in concepts, tore at my understanding of reality. She is nothing if not impressive in that way, isn’t she?”

Eris shook her head. “I will destroy her for this.” She growled and curled her hands into fists. “She is trying to stall me, to tempt me with visions of places that should not have been!” _Ones that I would have liked to live in. S_ he thought about the library, and recoiled.

Again Toland picked at the bone pitons attached to his cloak. “The emissary was held in high esteem. But he was mortal. Once possessed of a Spirit, he had given it away. I remember my life differently. Guren helped me on my path to enlightenment, but afterward I was endless, not mortal.”

“Are you only willing to help me if I guarantee your immortality?” _Coward_. He always had been. Every pretense of exploration, every experiment, was in fact an expression of a terror of living without knowing as much as he could about the sword-logic and without a reassurance that, with or without a Ghost, he could never die. Eris had realized this while both of them were still working with Eriana, and it still elicited in her a mix of disgust and sympathy. How he had manipulated the world so that sublimation by a Deathsinger appeared to be something that _happened_ to him rather than something he had done!

She stomped up the stairs and then down again, going around one of the flower beds on the way to him. Most of the beds were filled with leafy plants, but this one contained pink orchids and tiny dots of white blossoms. Or perhaps there were more flowers in the world she had broken into or forced Savathûn to create when she broke the crystal. She entertained an amusing fantasy of Savathûn scrambling to choose what kind of flower would be growing in _this_ Tower’s reception garden.

What exactly _was_ this Tower?

First, she needed to figure out how much Toland knew. Whether he could be trusted would come later, but knowledge was security to both of them.

“No.” Toland had spent all that time thinking about an answer to her question of whether his own immortality was his top priority. He shook his head in emphasis, short horns sweeping the humid air. “I will help because you are the one who asks.”

Eris patted her own cowl, self-conscious about whether her own disfigurement was so exposed and whether Savathûn had changed anything about herself. That would be a brand-new horror. She would not dwell on it. Best to not give the would-be-conquerer any new ideas.

“This world resonates strangely,” Toland said. “I can place exactly what is wrong with it, but in order to remember I need to compare that to your memories. Help me, Eris.” His voice faltered. “It is … confusing. I am and am not the emissary. He wants…” He hesitated.

“What?”

“To tell her. To tell Savathûn.”

“You must not! She and we are the only real things in this whole world, Toland, and you would hand her a knife!”

“How do I know which memories are false?” He was beginning to stare and sway, the existential confusion crumpling him again.

Eris held her palms up, signaling _stop_. “Resonance. You just spoke of our hope.”

“Yes.” He fumbled for one of the bone pitons and unhooked it. When released from his grip it floated on his palm. With one finger of the opposite hand he sent it into a spin like a compass. “Remember, I am the emissary. I can test this world.”

“As much as you are not.”

“Just that much, I am.” His voice became softer and more precise.

Eris felt the moment of agreement like a change in atmospheric pressure. “Run your test that can tell you what is real. Do not make sudden movements.”

He closed his eyes.

The new awareness came to Eris as definitions. They appeared in her mind as if she had read them. Letters swam in front of her eyes, but she couldn’t be sure whether they were physically present. Perhaps they were flung from the spinning piton, crossword-tangles of letters she could somehow understand:

**definition: The World. The gardener is trapped in a pit, spinning around the rim of a black hole while time grows slower and slower. That clock will never reach zero. Somewhere, there is a clock that will never reach zero. The Machine with Concrete one day turns.**

**definition: Another The World. The gardener sleeps the sleep of the concussed, floating above the steppe, Earth, the Orion Arm, the Milky Way. That clock is forever on zero and one at once. The gardener has decided the solution to violence is to create beings for whom violence does not stick. Any horror may be inflicted on their bodies, and their memories and nervous connections will be transferred, with complete continuity, to another.**

**definition: Eris Morn. Human. Guardian. Hunter. hunter. Researcher. Sorceress. Hails from a world the gardener knows. Nuisance. Menace. Questions the nature of that which answers its own question. Attempts to re-define definitions. Ontologically threatening. Physically wounded in the same way as any mortal creature. Physically wounded in a way never before recorded in human history.**

**definition: Toland. Human. Guardian. Warlock. warlock. Consumed by the Deathsong. Alive within the boundaries of death like a mouse in the walls of a house. Observer. Researcher. Professes to follow the sword-logic but does not kill. Removes himself from definitions. Ontologically vacant. Potentially threatening due to disregard for privacy of information. Physically nonexistent. Reconstruct for additional World definitions based on year xxxx base memory. Physically decisive with regards to his own nature in a way never before recorded in human history.**

Eris ran nictitating membranes over her eyes, dimming strange light and easing the dry feeling that had started to plague her. She had not expected the sharing to be so clinical. Braced for emotion, she felt strangely empty having not received any. Whether or not he was feeling the same surprise, Toland was silent, a sure sign that he was disturbed in one way or another. The sound of sprinklers began as hidden pipes misted the garden. The sky above them was still a bright, beautiful blue, flecked with fluffy, white clouds.

“Tell me what you remember from your true past,” she said. “Not what you just learned. What you remember.”

He held her gaze. “We lost our Ghosts together. I floated free on the Sea of Screams. I felt powers like the wakes of distant ships: Riven, the Awoken queen Mara Sov, Savathûn herself distant and hiding. I had written you letters, but some …”

“… were not sent.” Eris said. _I should not miss you, but …_

“I remember the difference now.”

“You have returned.”

“Yes. And Savathûn… she’s breaking the rules.” He smiled with teeth, almost hissed. “This is not a throne-world. She has gotten inside our heads, and if we let her, she’ll give us an endless life for every second of imprisonment. I must return to the Sea of Screams. At least I know that place is real. This is a clever prison, a box with sliding doors. How cruel of her, to show her true power in this way. She can trick us however she wants. But she cannot hide from you the fact that it is a trick.”

“This I have proven. With every crystal we destroy, something changes.”

“There are many crystals like this in her fortress on the Moon. Ranks of them, guarded by her strongest Wizards. And others sit like teeth in the mouth of Eir, the worm which took the place of the Traveler.” He looked away from her for a moment, in the direction in which he could have seen the worm if the walls had not been angled to prevent it.

“I have been hoping to have a reason to destroy that worm,” Eris growled. Even if it wasn’t real, destroying it would feel good.

Toland nodded. There was a heavy pause, as if he was hesitating to say something that both did and did not need to be said. For years, they had been composing sonnets to one another and never sending them. And now …

“Are you willing to go back to the Moon to destroy the crystals in her fortress?” Eris said. “I’ll break them here, as many as I can.”

“Be careful, Eris. She shows the love of the Hive to you now, allowing you leeway to fight her. You will be in the jaws of the worm, but also hers.”

“You too. I cannot trust the rules of her world will remain the same. I can only trust you to survive them.”

“Tread lightly, Eris,” Toland said.

Eris found herself wanting to linger. “When you get back, will you tell me of the beauty of the Moon?”

He had still been holding the piton. It had stopped spinning and now lay still in his gloved palm. Now he folded it away between the folds of his cloak. “I will tell you just as much as you want. No more and no less.”

“Thank you.”

Toland walked to the top of the garden. He met Eris’ eyes before he disappeared in the same kind of cloud of darkness from which he had come. Eris spent the span of several breaths calming her racing thoughts. _Would he be safe? Would she? Where are the Vanguard now? Would Ikora still help her now that she had destroyed the crystal? What is real? What are the limits of Savathûn’s rules of war?_

There was one more thing she knew she had to do before she ended this world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always meant to have an Eliksni Vanguard in this story, but the Fallen aren’t my speciality, and in this case worked best as a cameo. But I do have ideas laid out for how exactly Mithrax would have wound up in the Tower.


	4. Chapter 4

Eris crouched on a catwalk on the outside wall of the Tower. Birds flew on wide wings below her. If she fell, she would flail and there would be no Ghost to catch her.

The worm was still curled out there. Even though destroying the crystals in its mouth was the only concrete plan she had for how to further destabilize this false world, she had felt a pang of disappointment when she saw that it still floated there.

She had climbed up here through unfamiliar hallways and ducts, wasting time. She had no way to tell Toland she was not going directly for the worm. But she needed to see this, needed to know, and she remembered where Eriana used to live. The two of them had spent so many nights there, Eris sleeping on piled plush blankets on the floor after a day of studying or fighting or playing games. The layout of the Tower had changed, but not so much that she didn’t still know some of the secret ways, even in the Warlocks’ especially changeable halls.

Perhaps Savathûn had not been clever enough to re-make this part, and had simply created it from Eris’ memory.

Eris clamped her hand around the railing and looked down.

Just below and to her right, where they could see her if they looked up, Eriana-3 and Wei Ning sat at tea. Eriana’s yellow and silver armor plating glittered. She wore an orange robe stitched with red accents, loose enough that it pooled around her exposed forearms. Sunlight glimmered off her. She turned her head to pour tea for Wei, hiding her eyes from Eris. Wei was turned in a direction such that if she had looked up she would have seen Eris easily, but she did not seem interested in looking at anyone except her partner. Her brown hair, usually tied up to fit under her helmet but now loose, fell over her face. Soft music played from inside the small room.

Eris retreated back inside the crawlspace. Watching them any longer felt intrusive. But, as she turned and heard their muffled voices, she suppressed a sob. She breathed in deep and tried to turn the knot of emotion into her throat into determination.

She would fight for them. In a way, she was always fighting for them, no matter what world she lived in.

Then came the fury. She had considered studying more, finding the weaknesses of the worm Eir and how exactly the Traveler had become trapped in the well of a black hole. But now she find that she did not care, did not need to know in order to decide what to do next. She would requisition an atmospheric ship from the hangar, as any Guardian could do. She would rally the Vanguard. She would go to the worm. And she would tear out its teeth.

* * *

The emissary of Savathûn’s broods returned to make his traditional report in the World’s Grave. Golden dust fell softly into untouched, green corners. A distant shuffle of feet never quite resolved into living forms. The susurrus of the Hive slowed Toland’s breath, loosened his limbs, brought a blush to his face. He was comfortable here, as comfortable as he was anywhere. All danger here was so _obvious_ about itself. That was far more reassuring than some unknown force waiting in the night to destroy him. The existence of that force was undeniable. The key was to make it _known_.

And here he would—was supposed to—meet the Witch-Queen. He had two distinct paths of memories of her, although the false one was beginning to fade as he insisted that it was not true. In the real one, he was one of the few permanent residents of the Sea of Screams, a soul without a body or a death. He had left Eriana-3’s fireteam after giving Eris the Bond of Emerald Night, because he had wanted to know the secrets of the Deathsingers and secure his own immortality. He had believed in Eriana. She should, by rights, have been able to lead her noble, strong Guardians into Crota’s fortress and slay him with his own swords, whether or not Toland was there. In that universe, he remembered, tenacious, hearty Eris and sent her lofty letters, half comfort and half prophecy.

In the false world, he had similarly given himself to the Hive, but the circumstances had been very different. Without any taboo against the sword-logic, he had been elevated, not exiled, for his interest in it. (Oh, how interest looked like devotion … but they were not exactly the same.)

The green-gray walls shone darkly in the reflected light from wall sconces and the eyes of the Knights who patrolled around the entrance. The Wizard who usually met him here was not present. Toland scowled.

His memories still flowed together. He was the emissary, and he was the shattered one, and … he would do this for Eris. How right it had been, to perform the ritual for her. _One has come to claim your throne_ , he imagined himself saying to the Witch-Queen’s false face in this world. _One has come to grow thorns around your throne, so that it forever sits empty._ He would be an eye in every corner of her palace. He would fall to his knees, and ask her what she wanted him to do, and hope she asked him to stay.

He shook his head. One of the Knights looked at him. The tip of its sword knocked the head off a hollow, chalky-leafed plant growing from a crack between the flagstones.

“Where is the Listener?” Toland demanded.

“North.” The Knight’s voice was a deep, warm rumble.

“Of course, she’s north, you buffoon.” Like her brother Oryx before her, Savathûn bent reality around her. Savathûn’s power was such that she could do so even in the mundane geography of the Moon, not only in her own throne world. “When was she here last?” Re-framing the question as a query about time would get him what he actually wanted.

“Three circles.” Three times around the World’s Grave. Long enough that she might not have been able to report any higher up the chain yet. Toland knew where she was going, and knew that the emissary being just minutes late from his post-sacrifice meeting would not be a cause for a lot of alarm. He was a first line of defense, but he was also just a functionary. As long as the Guardians didn’t do anything stupid in a few minutes, Toland would have time to reassure the Wizard that the ritual had gone perfectly.

Unfortunately, he _had_ just adamantly agreed that her next move should be to incite the Vanguard to do something that the Hive would see as very, very stupid.

Toland brushed very real but hardly visible dust off his forearms. With every step he took down from the top of the room, his footfalls echoed loudly. Once, he had been so comfortable in these halls. The Knights had been protectors. Now, he felt afraid every time he looked at them. The fact that both emotions could be closely held at the same time was unusual but not without its uses. With the confidence of long experience he walked smoothly out the door.

Once in the hallway beyond, he abandoned the pretense of going after the Listener. There was no time to lose. He considered trying to talk the Listener in circles, but heading directly to the cache of crystals he knew Savathûn kept in her throne room would be equally efficient.

On the way, he passed an armory. Glancing inside, he saw the diamond-hard swords of Hive Knights and loops of chain that could as easily wrap around a throat or disappear into ascendant space. Among the more arcane tools of war were also more mundane ones. A Titan’s golden-and-white axe lay on a shelf of stone, singled out as if it was a trophy. Two Awoken swords, identical blades made of blue-violet jewel and golden thread, had been dropped much less ceremonially on the ground. He stepped into the room. These swords would be useful. He could already think of more uses than simply using them to crack the crystals, although that was a good option too.

He let both swords dangle from one hand as he walked casually though the caves of the Moon.

He was just beginning to feel confident, even cocky, that the plan would work when the Moon shook. Knights marched by him. He grabbed at one of them, but they were moving at such speed and had such layers of chitin on their shoulders that they paid him no attention at all.

“You. You! What’s happening?”

The Knight still did not stop to answer him. But a flock of thrall trotted after them, and one turned its bulbous, infant head toward him.

“Treachery,” it croaked.

Others bit out single words. “Attack!” “Human!” “Tower!” “Eir!”

And then the others took up the cry of the name of the worm, “Eir! Eir! Eir!” as if it stirred them to greater heights of violence. The words echoed and crashed against the walls like waves. The thrall were a stomping crowd, hundreds of legs and hundreds of heads. And then they were gone, past him, leaving Toland standing in the hallway with wide eyes and nothing, nothing at all, to lose.

A Wizard followed. She stopped long enough to look at him. “It’s more than that. There has been a betrayal. Secret knowledge freely given, Eir’s belly, still impenetrable, exposed. Some of us would suspect you, emissary, if your record was not already so spotted with our enemies’ blood.”

He heard: _You’ve been such a good traitor. Such a good servant._ He felt only some pride.

So, the timeline was accelerating and he was likely a suspect. He had to keep going. The location of the throne room was public, especially because Savathûn did not actually spend a lot of time there. Mostly, she reigned from the Ascendant Plane, where she could be safer and puppeteer both planes at once. Toland delved deeper into the caves, passing the Temple of Crota and the choirs of the Deathsingers and the alter of the Cryptoglyph.

Ir Yût lived not far from here, closed off with her cousins in Oryx’s realm. The siblings were all still alive in this world, Toland realized suddenly. They divided up space as if dividing up a pie, and their ascendant realms all touched at the corners, and they hated and loved in equal measure. Ir Yût let him listen to her songs sometimes, let him lean against the wall like an addict and be almost taken by the song until, fearful of Savathûn’s jealousy, the younger Deathsingers picked him under the arms and deposited him outside the door. He shivered and curled there and scratched at the door, lay his forehead and sometimes his mouth against the outside of the door. There was some passion in him that thrilled to the idea of coming so close to death and being pulled away at the last moment.

He had been so pathetic.

He still was, in some ways.

Anyway it was all a lie, all a dream. Far from him to tell whether it was a pleasant one or a horrible one.

Now, he stood outside the door to the throne room instead. Statues of indistinct Wizards had been carved on either side and then ritually destroyed, scratched with foot-long furrows. Some said they were symbolic of Savathûn’s siblings, but none said it where she could hear.

One door loomed at each end of the hall. Toland cleared the runes. The door to the throne room opened.

The room bristled with thick, pink crystals. They leaned over the throne like a bower, and clustered around the room like fields of fungi. If Eris was right, these were the pins that held this false world together. Shadows lay dark over the chitin-littered floor. The throne itself looked like it had been carved out of a single piece of black onyx. Two pieces spiked up from it like horns, curved down, and met to become the center of an elaborate model of the solar system. Each planet glimmered with a different color. They must have been made of jewels which were not mined on the moon. The person who sits here rules as far as the Sun does, this throne said.

Toland suppressed a strong desire to sit on it.

Two unusually large Knights thundered out of the darkness.

“No one is allowed!” One bellowed.

“Not even the emissary?” Toland tilted his head.

The Knight hesitated, as if wondering whether there was indeed a loophole that allowed the emissary to skulk around the throne when Savathûn was not present.

Toland stabbed forward. The first strike took the alien by surprise, cutting into its ribs. It collapsed in surprise, driving its body further onto the blade and hurrying its demise. Toland slashed out at the second Knight. Its shield flared to life. The blade hit it with the sound of rock striking rock. He pulled the sword in his left hand out of the collapsed Knight with some difficulty.

The moment the Knight took to huddle behind its shield and figure out what had just happened to its fellow gave Toland a moment to backpedal and hold both swords up in a clumsy guard.

His role as emissary meant he was strong with magic. The place where his Spirit had once lived tethered to his heart was now filled with the dust of the Hive, sparking together into friction-energies of power. Of anyone, Eris would understand this power the most. It did not mean that he was a strong swordsman, but it afforded its own advantages.

He conjured it now and threw a sheet of green fire toward the Knight. It dissolved the shield. His next sword-slash nicked the Knight’s chest, but it did not have enough of a neck to make a sword strike easy. It heaved forward and tried to sweep him aside with its blade, but he ducked inside the swing and followed it around. He had to jump into the air to stab the blade into the back of the Knight’s neck. Both of them fell, the Knight with the silent deadness of a rock fall and Toland breathing heavily, rolling, coming to hands and knees with a sudden horror that the Knight would be right next to him and barreling forward to kill him.

No attack came. Toland crouched in the shadow of the throne. Sound moved strangely, muffled by the thicket of crystals.

The Listener called down the hallway. “Who goes there? Who disturbs the peace?” Her voice rose so high and loud that it became almost a scream on the word ‘peace’.

Toland bared his teeth. He would have to make it look like someone else attacked the throne room. It would be easily enough with the Awoken swords. If the Listener thought Guardians were already in the throne room, he would buy Eris more time.

Or, he could tell her that he had killed the Guardians himself. Unlike Ghosts, Spirits disappeared and took their partners’ bodies with them into the ether when they died. That way, he would get credit for helping the queen, and perhaps the alarm would ease when the Listener thought the threat was gone. But that would _not_ in fact buy Eris more time. The Hive already knew the Guardians were attacking the worm Eir on Earth. The best way to stall the Listener would be to make her think there were still Guardians here.

It would remove any chance of Toland himself gaining clout from this mission, though. The Listener would know he had been skulking, perhaps even suspect that he had let the Guardians into the throne room.

He shook his head. This would buy the most time. But it would also _hurt._

He sat down beside the two fallen Knights and stabbed the right-hand sword into the muscle at the outside of his left forearm. His right hand spasmed and effectively dropped the sword, driving the stone blade further into the ground. He felt a scraping and a sudden static numbness of deadened nerves.

The pain flashed through him, juddering up nonsensically into his temples and his shoulders before becoming a sunburst of heat on his forearm. It had been a long time since he had felt so much pain. He hissed and screamed. One of the perks of no longer being a Guardian, no longer being Spirit-bound, was that he did not have to fight and die. He was a courtier! Curse Savathûn. If she had not broken the world, Toland would not have to be doing any of this—!

The tall Wizard’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. Through the terrible pain Toland saw the scene as like a painting; the towering crystals, the bright solar system above the throne, himself small but proportioned like the scene as a whole: the tall sword, himself bent over his arm. The perfect Hive emissary, he might very well have been taking a moment to recover from the psychic rustle of the tithe.

“Guardians.” He did not have to pretend to sound like it was difficult to speak. _Curse_ the Witch-Queen and himself and whatever Guardian had first owned this sword. He had been a fool. He had brought his own death upon him, finally, _stupid_ —

But it was for truth. It was for how he knew _, knew_ that Eris was right about this world being a dream.

The pain was a _nightmare_. The Listener’s words echoed around him, but he could not tell what she was saying.

“Invasion … it … watch …”

Toland lost time. Red blood, so much that it looked black, was welling, too thick to drop but pooling under his arm. Mercifully, the Listener left. Should he pull the blade out or leave it where it was? This was a wide blade, not a needle-knife, bleeding enough and already having torn through muscle. It wouldn’t get worse, would it? If he had had a Ghost, he would have had to pull the blade out or risk coming back with it knit inside his arm.

He focused his gaze on the top of a crystal on the other side of the room and pulled the blade out.

He lost time.

The Listener was gone. The cold air in the throne room was still.

He lost time.

He stood up. The sword’s blade was dark and messy with blood, laying on the floor next to her. He pulled his wounded arm close to him, wrapping his black clothes around it. There wasn’t quite enough to stop the bleeding, but the blood was clotting in his clothes, and the dark cloth made it harder to see exactly how much blood he had lost. Pain beat at him, insistent. Every second it reminded himself of its existence, and every time was new. But he had been a Guardian once, and he remembered surviving pains like this before.

_It’s worth it_ , he insisted. _It will heal. Magically or just after enough time, it will heal, and the Witch-Queen will know who grasped for the sword-logic in the shadow of her throne, and I will see Eris again._

He hadn’t killed anyone, had not worshipped in any way, but the pain in his arm felt like it should count for something. It was changing from needle-sharp to a defiant ache.

He lifted the sword in his opposite hand, pulling the wounded arm as tightly as he could against his chest. His heartbeat pulsed loudly and wetly in his ears, so loud that it startled him for a second.

It had been years since he had heard that. Since he, the real Toland instead of the false memories, had had a heartbeat. Years since he had gone to sleep with the slosh of blood in his ears, wondering whether Crota would bring down his planet-killing sword on the Earth in the night, or whether Rasputin would turn his mile-long guns back toward the people who had lost sight of the generations who had created him so long ago …

This melancholic introspection was better than losing time, but only by a little.

Toland picked up the Awoken sword again in his hale arm. He staggered over to the crystals. Eris needed him to do this to get back to the universe they both came from. If he did this, he could go back to not having a body any more, not having this inconvenience of pain—!

He brought the sword down. It took two painful swings before the crystal cracked in half. His arm ached.

Toland resettled his elbow and stepped back from his work. The inside of the crystal was more pale than the outside, and cracks spread from the larger one in white, fractal patterns like snowflakes. It broke in such perfect _order_. Guardians, dying over and over, looked something like this on an ontological scale. Fractal failure, in perfect patterns, able to piece the original back together if the angles were just placed right.

Toland smirked. If only someone had seen him here, seen his victory, his choice. He would tell Eris what he had done for her, and make sure it was in detail.

He raised the sword again.

A hand came down on his shoulder. The Listener pulled. He went sprawling onto the floor in front of the Wizard’s skirts. His shoulder slammed against the rock and burst with pain. Muscle tugged in his wounded arm and piled new, red blood on the black sheets. The Listener did not deign to gloat, did not bother to explain to him whether she had happened to come back or whether she had all along been planning to trick him into proving his treachery. She simply raised a clawed hand, and let him wonder, for a fraction of a second, whether it was the claws or a curse that would kill him.


	5. Chapter 5

Eris rallied the Vanguard.

Although the universe in which she was trapped had essentially been re-set to before her conversation with Ikora, the simulation was also straining to catch up with the changes. Eris suspected, although it was hard to tell, that Ikora was repeating lines she had already spoken to Eris in the previous instance. But this also meant that this Ikora could be quickly brought up to speed in regards to why she should join Eris in the fight against the Witch-Queen, and that the other Vanguard were mild, and more easily convinced. Something of Ikora’s old personality was showing through, fighting against the false version. Or Eris’ own perception of her was making this version’s character change. It would be fascinating to think about later, but for now, the emotion Eris felt toward the Vanguard constructs was half horror and half rage. They were in her _way_ , and they were parodies of the people she knew, or puppets. She missed _her_ Ikora terribly. At least she, unlike Eriana and Wei, was alive in the real world.

Eris just hoped the real world did not get any farther away.

Now, she stood with the Vanguard on a hidden balcony facing the worm where the Traveler should be.

“The Hive’s reign protected us from what I perceived to be greater dangers,” Zavala said. Eris needed to crane her neck to look up at him, so she stepped away for her comfort. His lip curled as if he thought she had made the move out of defiance, and she knew she had a long way to go before the Titan Vanguard trusted her. “But your tales of a world where this was never the case are also comforting in a way I could not have predicted.”

“They are not comforting to me,” said Mithrax, the Eliksni Hunter. In the short time Eris had known him, she had seen him console nervous fighters with an embrace, then push them toward their ships with a slap on the back.

“They would not be to me either if I had heard my species was at war with humanity.” Ikora looked up at the Traveler as soon as she finished speaking.

“All of your strengths will be needed for this,” Eris said. “I cannot wait. Turn the worm’s attention away from me in any way you can.”

An atmospheric ship hovered just beside her, engines rumbling, ready for her to take control. Again, she dearly missed her Ghost, who had always been a reliable wingmate when Eris was flying. Brya always had been there offering information, timing Eris, all with a measured, calm tone that kept Eris herself at ease.

Perhaps, in this world, Brya would have been a Spirit. Perhaps, in this world, she would also have died in any way a Spirit could, and Eris would have been left alone.

Ikora’s smile was like the sunrise: a bright sliver, impossible to look at directly. “I suggest you strike while the time is right,” she said. A purple ball of Void energy, cold enough that Eris felt a sudden chill against her skin, bloomed from Ikora’s left hand. “And, Eris?”

Eris braced herself to swing her legs into the cockpit. The ship was much smaller than the last one she had used, just large enough for a pilot and snug as a winter coat. Its interior radiated heat. “I allow you one more wise saying, and then it will be too many,” Eris said. “I do not want you to sound like you are getting ready to say the last words I hear before I die.”

Ikora gave a tight smile. Eris could not tell whether the blunt words had hurt her. They had hurt Eris, too, but her capacity for pain was askew.

“Eriana would be proud of you,” Ikora said.

Eris sat heavily in the ship. She met Ikora’s eyes as the cockpit quickly closed over her. The ship tilted back and forth slightly, like a boat on an ocean. Or, Eris thought grimly and as a delaying tactic before she had to turn away once again, like their chances of succeeding.

She cruised away.

The Tower fell along her left side and stayed there, diminishing, while she rocketed toward the cocoon and the worm.

From the first time she had seen it, she knew the worm’s wrapping to be permeable. In a kinder world, she might have been curious enough to ask Ikora what the cocoon looked like to human eyes, but, as of now, there was no chance to ask for curiosity’s sake. With her Hive eyes she knew that it was a doorway. Although it existed completely in the physical world, it shared crafting elements with the portals Hive Wizards used to travel between planes.

She flew through it. Tatters of white material streaked across the windows.

Up close, the worm was segmented and gray-green, peaks rising like a mountain range over its spine. With its mouth closed, the head was almost perfectly triangular, with something dragonish in the way the jaws met. Eris remembered Xol from Guardians’ reports, and knew that this worm was even smaller than he was. But then, it was not meant to be one of the combat forms, one of the tithe-takers who loomed over battlefields. This was something else. Eris steered her ship around it in a steady circle, unafraid of disturbing the cocoon but not yet wanting to get close enough to the mouth that the worm would be sure to react. Since this worm gave the Guardians their new power, it must channel the Hive’s mastery over death somehow. But how? Surely Toland knew. One day she might like to ask him. She wondered whether he was cajoling and charming his way into Savathûn’s throne room. The Witch-Queen might give him some mighty compelling reasons to stay…

Enough worrying. Eris circled around once more before aiming the ship for the worm’s mouth.

Like the smaller worm forms she had studied, this one’s three eyes were bright and without irises. From a human perspective it was staring with an instinctual, eager hunger. To someone accustomed to spending time among the Hive, the worm had a personable face that was both alarmingly and reassuringly familiar. Like the sphinx, the mythical winged lion with the face of a woman, the worms had the face of a Hive.

No wonder the three sisters had thought they were gods.

The ship came to rest by the mouth, close enough that Eris could see the texture of the worm’s jaws. Lacunae occasionally opened up on its skin, venting air in and out. The skin looked soft to the touch, like a caterpillar’s.

She popped the cockpit open. The roar of the ship filled her ears. The worm seemed no more disturbed by this than it had been by the ship before.

When she touched it, it reacted exactly as she had hoped it would. _Yes, be furious, creature. Show me your teeth. Try to eat me, so that I might unmake you._

The green jaws opened wide. Now that she could no longer see the three eyes, the creature gave her an even greater impression of partial blindness, of being trapped in this cocoon which was also the womb that sustained it. How intelligent was this worm? What echelons and classifications of Hive existed here that did not in her world? She did not wonder this just as a curiosity, although (in another world) she might have spent a pleasant hour reading Toland’s or Adonna’s papers on that very thing. Now, it was a practical necessity, the difference between life in reality and life in Savathûn’s gilded prison—or perhaps death, in both worlds, and an end to all her efforts.

“Defy me, worm,” Eris said, and curled her lip, and bared her teeth, and as if in answer it opened its massive jaws wider.

Crystals stood in packed ranks in its mouth. Far, far more crystals than teeth were arrayed there, as if this, in fact was the worm’s primary purpose: an intimidating biological storage room for all of these reality-building loci. A tongue lurked somewhere in that mouth; she could see it as a thin, red line deep in the pit that was the lower jaw. She would have to stand on the ring of gum that held the teeth or risk falling into that pit. Each tooth stood like a needle between the crystals, much thinner, sharp and gray.

A breath screamed out of the worm. Eris’ headdress pulled against her neck, but she had secured it to the cowl of her shirt well, and it did not blow off. With a couple more blasts like that, she was almost certain that it would. How much time did she have between breaths? Was there enough time to find out?

The air grew still again. She stepped onto the gum. There was just enough space there for her to balance. From where she had stored it inside the ship she drew a spear. It had been forged, Ikora said, by Lady Efrideet, keeper of the monastic immortals of the Iron Temple. What exactly their arrangement with the Hive was was a story Eris had not asked about but would also, under better circumstances, have liked to know. The spear was iron, with a runnel for oil and flame, and carved with runes of protection. Those Eris had recognized without having to ask.

She wedged one spear between two of the back teeth, and turned back to pull a second spear from next to the cockpit seat. Just likebuilding a shelter in a high wind. Just like that.

The worm noticed. It thrashed and turned away from the ship. The world around Eris blurred, and the second spear, just at the tips of her fingers, was suddenly meters away. It might as well have been a kilometer. The worm swung in the other direction. She put her head down, using one of the massive teeth for protection. _Don’t look at the spear. Don’t picture it creaking, bowing, snapping in half and letting this thing eat me._

_The crystals. Get to the crystals._

She pedaled, as if on loose rock, down to the nearest crystal. They cluttered the worm’s mouth so tightly there was no space between them. Luckily, each seemed to stand loosely in a socket, the neighboring crystals keeping it from falling over. They were about the height of the other crystals she had seen, between half a meter and a hand-span in length. However, because of where on the slope of the mouth she was standing relatively to them, she had to bend down to pick some up, and others loomed over her.

She threw crystal after crystal down into the sky. Peristaltic spasms squeezed and flowed around her like waves. A small mercy: the mouth of the worm was dry, its texture as soft as putty. She threw more crystals down. Her arms ached.

The worm tried to lift its head. Suddenly the world was a dark green pit below her, the nearest tooth the only ledge she could hold on to. She kicked at the crystal below her. It rocked out of its sconce and tumbled into the worm’s throat, lodging horizontally.

The worm choked. Eris felt as much as heard the outrush of air as it hissed in surprise. The peristaltic waves stopped, started erratically, and stopped again. The crystal was slipping.

Thankful she had kept up with exercises now that her Ghost was no longer around to build her a strong body, Eris pulled herself onto the nearest tooth. It was a narrow, slippery surface, and her boots threatened to slip. There was the edge of the mouth, and there the ship. The engine roared like the worm. Through the gap between the two, Eris could see peaceful blue sky and white clouds, so far down that the city was a blur of brown and green.

She could jump back to the ship now, or she could keep breaking crystals. There were so many, a thicket of them still standing, and none seemed to be having any effect on the world. Maybe, this high up, none of them had even broken from their fall yet.

Her next move was an attack of opportunity; if the nearest crystal had not been in grasping distance, she might have gone to the ship in order to at least get out of the mouth. Now that it was open, she could blast the crystals apart from outside. But this pink diamond was right here. She lifted it and cracked it against the worm’s tooth, slamming it once against the side and once against the pointed tip. Pieces of the crystal rained down onto the teeth, other crystals, and empty sockets.

Eris grinned. At last, she could see the very direct result of her work.

The wash of the atmospheric ship’s engines sent yellow particulate curling into the blue sky. The roar of the ship in her ears mingled with the worm’s panicked exhalations. Cold air prickled at her cheeks, her chin, tried and failed to find exposed skin between her boots, socks, and leggings.

Would the worm close its mouth? She placed one foot further up the jaw, feeling like a hiker on a steep mountain. But the feelings of exultation drowned out her fear. She looked up at the place where black gum turned to green skin on the worm’s lip. _See that, Savathûn? No matter where you hide the underpinnings of your world, I will dig to them. I will climb to them, and I will tear them—_

Eris Morn lost time.

The world went away. Like the other transitions, it was smooth. Unlike them, what she saw when she woke up did not resemble the Tower, and did not resemble the worm.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eris ventures into a new part of Savathûn’s game: a Dreadnaught. Reunited with Toland, it becomes more difficult to deny the tension between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the dialogue in this chapter comes from a canon narrative preview.

Eris Morn floated. At their best, hot baths felt like this: the surrounding water almost the same temperature as the core of her body, the tendency toward both murmuring echoes and clear, clean sights. So very _warm_ , compared to the cold in the sky above the Tower. A slightly acidic smell was the only thing that marred the peace. Her limbs felt loose and limber. Pain did not highlight the shape of her bones. She took a deep breath, felt warm liquid move against her face, and—there, there was the first glimmer of fear since she had woken up. Everything else was so very peaceful. If she opened her eyes, the peace would be gone, and … why? Nothing would be worth the terrible effort it would take to do that, or the pain of the separation between herself and the perfection of the surrounding sensation of a warm cradle. The orange liquid moving over her face could have been the ichor that swept continuously from her eyes, but it did not usually feel so hot. Warm, yes, as warm as the tears her body could no longer make, but not hot and intrusive.

And she had not been here a moment ago. She had been standing on the precarious jaw of the worm, trying to reach her ship, trying to smash as many crystals as she could. Savathûn, trick-mistress and eater of ideas, had changed the world again. And instead of a Hive-owned Tower, a vision of her home under gentle surrender, it was … whatever she floated in now.

Thinking of the Tower made her consider whether this was just another kind of gentle surrender.

She opened her eyes.

Serenity stole over her again. It was _right_ that she was here, cocooned as the worm had been in an orange globe the consistency of new-flowing amber. She watched her own hand with fascination, short, gloved fingers limp in the gelatinous substance which held her. So warm, so pleasant, so content with herself. She could stay here in an eternal now.

It was _right_ that she could let her gaze lazily move as she lifted her head to feel the amber hug the back of her neck. It was right that she would see, through sheets of the orange and amber layers of the egg, Toland curled as if in the womb. A sense of grace clung to him, a timelessness in his black robes, the tightness of the skin at his wrists, the crow’s feet on his face. His hair spread out around him like a cloud, ragged at the black edges. In him she saw some elements of herself, singular, a solitude shaped just so to contain two people. With time to consider, she felt for him with a sensibility shivering like the top of the water; one part attraction, one part mirroring, one part mystery, one part understanding. He wanted to _know_ and she wanted to _know_ and somewhere along the way they began to look at one another, since there was no way to hold _knowing_. They would be held and behold.

Except, as her mind rose as if from sleep through foggy surfaces, different depths and consistencies of water, her comfort was interrupted by the fact that she did not want to be touched at all. Her skin was too porous, too easy to part and find the ichor. Any touch would be a bruise.

When she waved her hand through the viscous substance in which she floated, she felt waves of pressure flow toward Toland and back to her. He was floating with his head turned away, just the corner of one green eye visible. In this world he again looked like he had in the library, like he had so briefly in the tunnels, when she had thought she might at last love him: human except for the eyes and horns like hers. He did not touch her now, but nor was he separated from her by anything but the gelatinous medium that held them suspended above some invisible patch of ground. Eris knew well enough that those eyes could not close easily. She also knew what it was when awareness came to them, when the person who had learned to sleep with their eyes opened came to human awareness.

Everything around them was orange shading to yellow shading to white. Everything around them was pleasant, curving lines that relaxed the eye. The liquid against her own cheeks felt like a mathematically perfect curve, more beautiful than any pillow she had ever felt. Toland’s shoulders curved where they met his back, his spine curved, his hair curved above him. She appreciated the beauty of the design of his body in the same way she would appreciate mountains in the sunset, all curves and color and the dark line between stone and air. Perfect.

She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and leaned back into the gelatinous substance around her to begin what she anticipated would be the best sleep she had ever had.

Last time she had slept this well, she had been … in the Tower library? No. There had been no actual sleep that day, just the dream Savathûn had thrown her into. Gradually she remembered the other versions of the Tower, Toland holding the bone piton, her near fall into the worm’s mouth.

Oh.

_Oh_.

Savathûn had simply _moved_ her again, shuffled her—and Toland, now that she had discovered that he was also from her world, and simply trapped in other ones—into some other plane. Eris bared her teeth.

_No! The Witch-Queen’s trickery cannot have captured her again!_

She tried to reach upward. The gelatinous substance around her was difficult but not impossible to push through, as if she was swimming in a vat of marrow. How was she _breathing_? Now that she thought about it, she could feel the substance pressed against her mouth and nose, warmed by her breath. When she breathed out of her nose with a strong push, bubbles rose upward.

She had to swim, kicking with her legs and flexing her shoulders, to even turn so that she was facing fully upward. Only then could she start to push with her arms against the gelatin. She tried to push upward because that was the way the bubbles rose, and because that was one of the ways from which the bright yellow light filtered wetly into the rest of the orange glow.

She swam. In three good kicks she could feel the edge of the substance, little whips of cooler air on her fingertips, different enough to be felt through her gloves. The surface broke with a satisfying tear. The edges were too slick and fragile for her to grip; instead they broke under her fingers. She swam diagonally for one more sweep of her arms, then closed her eyes and pushed her face into the thin membrane.

The air outside was much colder. Perhaps compared to the air of the Tower, it would simply be room temperature, but now it felt frigid. _If I don’t find out what is out there, I will never get back home and defeat Savathûn once and for all._

She pushed out. Her feet found the floor. Thankfully, it had been only a few inches below the edge of the … egg. Yes, now she could see that it was certainly an egg, or the substance that was used to create the Hives’ broods. Why? Why place her inside?

Because this was not a real world. Savathûn spoke in symbolism and mystery. The egg was a message, and, while she had been inside, Eris had understood that message perfectly. Savathûn was offering safety. And this time, she was offering Toland too, right away.

_Fantasies,_ i _mages of the two of them together, the floor spattered with orange slime, his bare fingers on her bare back, the warmth of their prison. Fecundity and birth, but not of something human. They are not vessels. They are instruments playing a dirge for an alien army, a surrender that is pleasure because of their hatred of pleasure. She would eat yolk dripping with sun-yellow fat. Walking tunes heart-beating in her throat, pink rose paint on graying, flaking skin._

_No. Not yet. S_ he must drag the world down from over her like sweaty sheets. She should not think of him so, and she should not distract herself, and she should forget the way Toland-as-the-Emissary reached toward her in the Tower’s hidden garden. Eris turned. Boots found purchase on green-gray ground. It was solid ground at last, not the pit of the worm mouth or the endless fall of some gray-black psychic astronomy.

The nearest walls loomed in like garrets, green ribs etched with scratches. It was a closet of a room, filled only with the two human-sized orange eggs. One hallway lead outward, inviting yellow light glowing softly from an unseen lantern around the corner. Even though she could not see it, Eris thought she could picture exactly what that lantern would look like. The walls were familiar. And, more than that—unlike in the Tower, the sixth sense gifted or cursed to her by the Hive was alive and questing here. The spine of the ship tugged at the back of her own neck. Old voices echoed here, passed through routing the lingering energy burning off like decaying atoms in the spine of the ship. She was standing on the Dreadnaught, or a Dreadnaught, in dead-silent orbit around Saturn. She would have bet her right crown-horn on it.

She took a deep breath in and let it out deliberately slowly.

When she sank her hands into the second egg the warmth no longer felt comforting. Now it was rude and cloying, not spring’s hopeful warmth but midsummer’s inescapable burn. She dug, little animal scrapes until the gluey substance began coming off in larger chunks and pooling on the floor at her feet.

Toland was turned away from her, so that she leaned over the trailing edge of his back and his long, black cloak to reach his shoulder. Shoulder blades would be folded in like wings, enchanted sleep finally smoothing the tension out of a body used to centuries of late nights and fear. Up on her toes, she pressed down on his jacket and pulled.

He woke immediately, craning his neck and then struggling to lever himself upright. She moved back out of the way of sharp elbows and avalanching, sliding swaths of runny yolk. Chunks collected in his hair. He sat up, found himself sinking, pawed his hair over his shoulder, and stood up. Eris backed up quickly as he found his feet, staggering once before he stood. He didn’t look at her right away. When he did his eyes were wide, his mouth slack.

Toland looked at his left forearm, patted it with the right hand as if he had expected to find something on his arm which was not there. Then he looked from her to the orange egg and back.

“Let me go back in,” he said.

Ah. This. As much as she despised it, this was also one of the things about him that made his presence so satisfying to her. She would have waited years to tell anyone how comfortable she had been inside that strange prison. He admitted it, was even proud of it, made it his entire motivation and persona.

“It is time to wake up,” she said.

“Ah, but which part is the dream?”

“That particular riddle is so easy as to be insulting to both of us,” she said.

He looked as if he honestly regretted saying it to her. His face was still slack, his hands loose at his sides. Seeing his posture so broken, some tendon of whatever poise he had held as the Emissary gone, recalled that previous incarnation’s prickly strength to her. 

“Tell me.” She moved closer. With just inches between their noses, she could feel every centimeter of the distance as if it had been marked out in pen. And in the dusty, oh-so-still atmosphere of the Dreadnaught, where time held its breath and death walked on a pale worm’s belly, it was so easy to feel the importance of that distance. “Tell me whether it truly escapes you that Savathûn cradled us like a child of her broods? She promises poisoned milk! I could not see the terror for the comfort either, not at first. You remember where you were when she stole you away from our true home.”

“I do.”

“Where was it? Tell me.”

“Why, I lived in the Ascendant Plane! Is it your turn not to remember, dearest Eris?” He still stood close.

“I remember very well,” she growled, and swept past him toward the light at the turn of the tunnel. She stopped at the corner. He wrunghis hair out, twisting it into a coil over his right shoulder. The orange mucus from the egg clumped in bubbles that clung to the black strands.

Eris shook her head, feeling her hat shift against the scarf that bound it between her horns. At least she would not have to clean her hair.

Toland had regained some of his usual doomsaying affect. “She banished both of us. How did she knew I had drawn you a map to her bower? Perhaps she planned more than we think.”

“I cannot go on while imagining that all of this is layers upon layers of trickery,” Eris said. “In the Pit, in the Tower when Guardians whispered about me, in the Ascendant Plane when Mara Sov spoke in orders almost as cryptic as your proclamations and Savathûn’s shifts of the world—I could only ever react to what stood in front of my eyes, Toland! I am afraid of jumping at shadows! Of wondering when the world will fall out from underneath me!”

It already had. She wanted to find the lantern. She could lean against it. She could rest, in the light and the cloud of bugs. She stumbled, reached out, found the horn of the lantern’s filigree with her gloved hand and leaned on it. Toland had not come around the corner, as far as she could see. She did not care. He would follow her; he always was following _someone_ , and this time she would _make_ it be her.

The world _had_ fallen out from under her feet. Vertigo rose, and she felt as if she was again standing on the slope beneath which was only either the worm’s mouth or the empty sky or the hundreds of teeth and sharp-edged crystals.

“I am _so tired, Toland_ ,” Eris rasped. The light trapped in these sconces was as soft and peaceful as it had been in the Dreadnaught at home—the real Dreadnaught, which was not this ship, which did not, right now exist. She could look right at that light, try to make that one singular view everything she could see and everything she had ever seen, to simplify her complicated journey. It would not hurt her eyes. It would not have, she thought but was not sure, when her eyes were the ones with which she had been born and reborn and died for the second-to-last time. She clenched her teeth together and felt what would once have been tears. She was still human enough that the sensation of weeping felt different from the ichor that constantly leaked from his eyes. That thin, black ooze she could ignore, sometimes. She felt it more as a slick wetness on her cheeks, more like oil than salt water, than as any sensation produced from inside her body. Crying now felt like heat behind her eyes now and a hitch in her throat.

She did not see or hear him come around the corner. Nevertheless, when she lifted her eyes he was there, the oozing twist of hair hidden behind his horned head.

“She took my memory, for a while,” he said. “She did not do you the same pitying service."

“She wanted to use you to trap me, you know.” It was difficult to admit this, Eris recognized in the swirling mess of her grief, left-over adrenaline, and left-over-fear. Nevertheless, it was also the only way she could think of to say that she missed him. With him—with whatever the two of them were—she insisted to herself that she must say it in a way that would not tear her throat on the way out or give him an easy way to disguise his own true feelings. (Whatever they were—she suspected but could not be sure.). Given the chance, he would deny his own humanity with self-deprecating grace and cold prophecy. He did not insult her, as he did Guardians. But he did seem to spend so much effort talking around things he did not want to say that the result might be an insult to her perceptiveness.

Eris continued, “She thought that I would want to stay where you were, never mind that that place was a broken and distorted kingdom ruled by worms.”

“Clearly, you were not tempted so much as to not break out of her illusion,” he said.

Disappointment rose in her like thorny vines. Perhaps there would be a flower of hope on them eventually, but for now, Toland had yet again managed not to admit any emotion while clearly indicating he knew he was talking around a deep well of it. He was wrong, and she was low on emotional reserves enough to not hesitate to tell him the exact way in which he was wrong.

She was still bent over the large lantern that lay on its side in the floor, the pale green-white light still washing onto her face and making her skin tone and her eyes look even stranger in the weird light. “In our true world you lived in the Seas of Screams, just a translucent curtain away from me, and I was never tempted to visit you there either, no matter how the prospect might have soothed my years of thinking of you, and our entire fireteam, as ghosts.”

He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, just under his aquiline and once-broken nose. Scratching an itch, perhaps; he would not be used to having them. Or, using the movement as an excuse to delay. He usually spoke to people in conversations during which he did not even wear a face. Guardians would not be able to understand the expressions in his Hive-given eyes even if they could see them. But Eris could see both. Shifts of light in his eyes turned him from courtier to hunted animal, the muck of swamps not the chosen home of a curious scientist but the scum into which a fleeing beast crashes in an effort to find terrain that it knows better than the solid ground that allowed the hunter to approach.

“But here…” Eris continued. Try to find the hope, she thought. Just try. He is not asking you to admit failure. “Here she offered me a vision of a world where our fireteam never failed. That is what tempts me.”

“I had been thinking,” Toland said softly.

“This does not come as a surprise,” she replied.

His smile was so human, so unexpected, so clearly just as unexpected to him. It made her feel lighter. “Our fireteam was comprised of some of the best to ever wield the Light, and yet we were eviscerated with ease.”

“They had weapons… we were not prepared,” Eris said.

“While true, does the circumstance not bother you?” He tipped his head, curious, ravenlike in his black cloak.

He did not wear a bond, she realized suddenly. The Witch-Queen had intentionally not given him one?

“It haunts me to this day,” Eris said.

“And now she tries to push us even further from the source of that mystery. We must be looking in the right direction, or her to try to throw us off the scent so.”

“She may be trying to guide us toward an even worse fate, Toland. But …”

“I suspect we just came to the same conclusion.”

“She could just kill is. Instead, as beasts running from the hunter we still have some power. We still know these forests. As long as we can set one foot in front of the other …” She stood straighter, removed her supporting hand from the lantern.

“First,” he said, "I would like to wash my hair.” His expression crumpled, crows-feet spreading just at the edge of the chitin. Tiny scutes had taken root in his pale skin, and now shifted slightly. She could almost feel their edges under her fingertips just by looking at them. They would be rocky but warm, giving slightly at the edges.

“We will find you a place,” she said, smiling slightly. She felt healed from both her previous rapture in the egg and her gloom in the hall. She could not have said what was so comfortable and pleasant about their conversation. Often, even at the end of a pleasant conversation she was left with the feeling that the person she had spoken to did not trust her. In the Tower, this had been because the belief had often been true. None of them could truly understand her, except perhaps for Ikora, who had done so much work and provided so much comfort from the moment she knew what had happened to Eris.

But Ikora was the Warlock Vanguard, and Eris had never been a Warlock. She would not stay in the Tower and study. She would walk the trails like a Hunter and learn the terrors of the world through the soles of her feet, not through a book. She would not be able to understand them, or even to connect them to other moments and concepts in the right ways, without having a tactile experience of them.

(And now she was a Hunter who hated to be touched. Was there something wrong with that? If so, she would embrace its wrongness and do what was comfortable for her.)

Yes, Ikora almost understood. Ikora also represented the Guardians as a whole, those who did not trust Eris.

Toland had once represented her entire Crota fireteam, her friends bound by blood. Their conversations had left her with deep peace, perhaps all the stronger because it was contrasted with the threat of blood that existed everywhere during the Lunar Interdict.

Perhaps, now, Guardians were more powerful than they had been, and slaughtered the equivalent of a Hive Prince every day.

Perhaps, too, Eris should not build her relationships based on the ranks of invisible people each one represented for her.

But Toland offered himself as a symbol. He had spent so much time trying to become one—chasing the names of the worm gods, being banished from the Tower when the only other model of Guardian evil was the lone Dredgen Yor, who existed not in opposition to a central authority but as a mythic, almost essential part of the mid-apocalyptic wilderness in the Traveler’s early hibernation days.

Eris spoke. “This is not … It smells like the Dreadnaught. It looks like the Dreadnaught. But I cannot feel the Awoken colonies, or the Witch-Queen herself. Another pocket-world has trapped us, Shattered One. Are we to sit here and wait for her to tire of her prisoners, or are we to break out of the jail?”

“You say the sweetest things, Eris.”

“I have such an enthusiastic audience.”

Feeling loose-limbed and ready, she walked down the hall with the unspoken expectation that he would follow.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eris and Toland explore the false Dreadnaught.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The concept of the hull breach being a former broodhall came from my ever-creative fireteammate Jazzy.

The hallway quickly opened up into a more familiar one. Yellow light shone from lanterns and crystals onto a field which, in Eris’ world, had been a patrol route for Guardians and an ever-precarious beachhead for the Cabal which had crashed alive there. 

She and Toland stood on the top of three silver steps. Only the edges were silver; sand had washed onto the rest of the wide steps She recognized the room’s high ceiling and the low road down the middle. The most remarkable part of it in her world, the breach in the wall that stretched the whole length, was now gone. Instead, she saw a high wall of bronzed green and yellow scaling, with yellow light falling from the white crystals studding the ceiling like teeth. From this high vantage point, she could see through the whole room except for where it dipped into what she knew was a maze of worm-filled grottoes and artfully fallen columns.

If she had been standing lower, the room would have been unrecognizable because of the number of eggs placed in careful, beehive-like clusters around the whole room. Large eggs strained against their soft edges, ready to spill yolk-wet thrall onto the dusty ground. Other, tiny eggs pulsed with youthful yellow flashes. Soon, thrall would spill out of those eggs, and worms would come for them, and the thrall would wrestle to death among the eggs. Two wizards floated between the rows, tending the brood in whatever ways they would.

As soon as she saw them, Eris scuttled down the steps and took shelter behind the nearest large egg. Toland followed as if attached to her by a string, equally quick and quiet.

_So, the Cabal in our world struck a brood hall, and the Guardians make sure it can never be used again._

Once Eris knew what the brood-hall had been in the real world, she know how to navigate around it. Perhaps the Witch-Queen was building these dream-worlds from Eris’ old memories, or perhaps she thought accuracy was more alarming than an obvious falsehood.

In Eris’ estimation, the fact that she could forget she was not in her true life, her true timeline, was the great horror of the situation. This way, she could forget, only to jolt into a memory. She missed her Ikora, the real Ikora, terribly. Even Commander Zavala’s judgmental voice would be a gift over a comm today. What a nightmare it would be to forget that her old friends still existed!

Eris sidled along the right-hand wall. Where she could not squeeze between the eggs and the wall, she dashed onto narrow paths, keeping her eyes and ears open for the wizards. It was strangely easy to slip back into old habits: to listen for rustling in the dimness, to walk silently, heel-toe, in the shadows. Her hands suddenly felt very empty; she realized now that she held no weapon.

As soon as she reached the far corner of the room and could step into the first dip where the ground sloped down to the maze, she reached inside her sleeve for the tiny, stitched pocket. The shard of Ahamkara bone she always carried was resting there, warm from her body heat. She breathed a sigh of relief, then ducked her head to go into the worm tunnels. At least she had one weapon.

As a matter of ritual or convenience, the worm halls were left empty of anyone but the voiceless worms. She moved back until she was sure the wizards could not see her and pressed her shoulder blades against a wall speckled with tiny, clinging barnacles. She took a breath.

“I was not expecting that to be a brood-hall,” she whispered. “But we can catch our breath here.”

Toland pressed his back to the wall next to her. They had stopped at a room isolated from the warren by a fallen column on one side and a partially fallen boulder on the other. It would be difficult for a Hive larger than a worm to get inside, and the two entrances gave them a chance for escape if one did crawl in. But once inside there was enough room in the cave for them to have enough space to comfortably walk around. Eris could have stretched her arms wide and had inches of clearance between her fingers and the walls on either side.

“My perception of the Dreadnaught did not lend itself to mapping it from the ground, so …” He let his words trail off before he brought himself to a part of the sentence where he had to express his gratitude outright.

“It has been a long time since I have been on the Dreadnaught,” Eris said. “Did you know, I once suspected you haunted this place? You never told me whether you truly resided here.”

“I did. I told the Guardians to dance for me. It amused every party concerned.” He smirked.

Eris was not amused. Guardians’ antics could be tiresome, and with Toland beside her now it felt cruel for him to gloat about having been distant. “I would never have known.”

“And yet you sent me letters. I wondered …” She turned toward him. It was still unusual for her to have him here as a physical presence, taller than she was, taking up any space at all. Space flowed strangely on this ship, lines between people blurring, apertures opening in the air unexpectedly, soft as flowers opening.

“To tell you the truth …” Toland began.

“Yes.” _Out with it. Even if the truth is hard for you._

“My sense of time and place were blurred. I practiced on the Guardians, at first not certain whether my experiments would in fact send messages through to them. Afterward, I played with them. They gave me something new to see in my time in the Sea of Screams. Is that so bad, Eris?”

“I look not for excuses for the past but honest loyalty in the future.”

“The letters were more difficult,” Toland continued. “I could speak into minds, send frequencies Ghosts could pick up. There are conduits threaded through Ghosts that match those found on the Ascendant Plane, which is …”

“Strange.” Eris finished his sentence. “Does the Darkness and the Light speak the same language? We wondered, during the Great Hunt, about the origin of the Ahamkara and whether they stemmed from either great well of life or death. The origin of Ghosts seemed so clear.”

“Isn’t it so? I thought so. No Guardian scholar I ever read spoke of this hidden ability of Ghosts.” He almost shivered in academic enthusiasm.

“Fascinating…” Eris could not help but think of her own Ghost, and of how the conversation was yet another evocation of Brya. So many circumstances in the last few strange hours had reminded Eris of her. That wound was, perhaps, being gradually re-opened. She would have to be wary of sudden pains.

“But I learned how to thread words into those frequencies and send them out to you. It took longer than I would have liked, and sometimes left me exhausted, and in some new kind of pain. Is this apology acceptable?”

He met her eyes and lay his hands one in the cupped palm of the other. It was a too-obvious expression of surrender which could have been trite or mocking, but his tone, and the many long years she had known his affect, lead her to believe it was sincere. He could be combative and rebellious, mocking and stubborn. He had been aggressive and scathing in front of the Vanguard, once upon a time, from what Eris knew of his exile. But when he found something he truly believed in, something, perhaps, that he loved, he crumpled.

The things Toland loved and fought. The Hive, and, perhaps, her.

And the things Eris loved and fought. The Hive, and, perhaps, him.

“The apology may help me sleep, as your letters did.” Eris had read them in her small room in the Tower, autumn leaves falling outside.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Toland inclined his head and lifted it again, bright eyes flashing, a muscle working in his jaw.

“Terrible things they said, but also things of relief,” Eris said.

“I felt such terrible relief.” Toland’s voice had a hissing undertone to it, so that when he spoke with strong emotion it sounded almost as if a second person whispered behind him.

She would not move to touch him. He did not move to touch her. It was for them the way the rain does not touch the glass, atoms holding their nuclei close.

Eris worked spittle into her dry mouth. “Your hair is full of orange globs.”

Toland’s laugh was the skittering of worms among the midden heaps.

Sneaking-wise, skittish and sideways, she lead them to a place she knew was not guarded. The doorway provided guard enough. Here, waterfalls flowed upside-down out of a canyon so deep as to be bottomless. A high ceiling disappeared above the room into a foggy haze. Guardians told tales of invisible hallways here, and Eris used her Ahamkara bone to discover them and cross the rift. Luck guided her almost as well as a Ghost would have. (Or perhaps the Witch-Queen wanted her to walk these trails.) The open avenue on the other side of the canyon was a carved mound of stone that stretched down in ranks of stairs to the sheer drop-off before the canyon. Wide, smooth trails of graying yellow stone lead the eye, and perhaps the many marching feet of the Hive who traveled ritualized paths here, up to a door marked by runes and chains.

Most importantly, no Knights patrolled here. There was a comfortable measure of privacy in the wide avenue in front of the locked door. Eris gestured to the oil-slick rainbow water, which flowed uphill in channels.

Toland nodded. “Dream of camp showers with me. For now, I will do this quickly.”

She turned away while he experimentally plunged his hands into the water. Even though he was clearly going to wash only his hair, not take off even the outer layer of his cloak in this cold and dangerous place, there was an intimacy to the situation which made her feel vulnerable.

“No matter what we do here, we are dreaming while we are awake,” she said.

“What do you think she stands to gain from this?” More splashing sounds came to her as Toland spoke. It surprised and satisfied her that he was asking a question at all. Usually, when he did ask, he couched his confusion as a statement about the broader world. The questions Toland did not know how to answer did not, on the grand cosmic scale, have no answers. He simply did not know them, loathe as he was to admit it. Eris was well aware of this. The fact that this one clearly did have an answer he did not suss out was some kind of expression of vulnerability or what he might have thought of as weakness.

“It removes us from her chess board. So … time. Of all the many powers she has, stopping the flow of time is still not within her many abilities, thank the Traveler that it is not so,” Toland mused.

It was so comfortable to sit with him, to see dust floating like stars in the murky darkness above the furrow in the godship. The water trickled, making musical noises. Eris brushed a hand through the rill nearest her. The water was uncomfortably heavy on her gloves, and she was unable to feel the comforting cold clarity she imagined, but she did not want to unclasp her entire gauntlet. She needed to use every second wisely in this place.

In another world, perhaps, she could sit behind him in the water and run her hands through his hair to the scalp. Perhaps, in another world, he would immerse his hands to the wrist in the water beside her shoulders and she would lift herself to kiss him.

But today … no. It was not safe, for so many reasons. She bowed her head, trying to dispel the images. The Witch-Queen had not suggested these. Eris had done that well enough on her own.

Meanwhile, he walked loudly toward her. She turned around. He looked disgusted, and shook his hair behind him like an animal just allowed to leap out of the bath. Free of the orange goo, his hair looked thinner now, but not yet as oily as she remembered it often being before the attack on Crota.

“Are you so disgusted by the cold water?” She asked.

“It has been a long time since I have had a body.” He held up long, pale hands, with the backs to her. A smile lingered around his lips but did not quite stay. He, too, was rightfully wary. And for a reason she did not expect. She had never heard him talk about his embodiment this way before. She waited for him to say something else, but he did not. That was a relief.

Was he holding back out of nervousness? If so, she would prompt him.

Her own feelings about her body were—what had they been before she changed? It was easy to re-write them in memory. She hadn’t known any better, had lived in a society where Guardians’ bodies were disposable. Of course she had not thought of it as an extraordinary thing. But now that she was disfigured, she often wished she could see in the colors she used to see, or not have to clean flaking scabs off her shoulders. The ichor that flowed from her eyes pooled in her collar and needed to be hidden, tucked under, every shirt and every cloak folded under another, every time.

“While it galls me to admit the fallibility of my plan and the plan of the Deathsinger who made me, I did have times in the Sea of Screams where I missed running up stairs,” Toland said. “I missed casting fire from my hands, which … now is gone from me forever. From us. This body’s knees do not creak yet, but they will.”

It surprised Eris that his estimation of the situation was so straightforward.

“While this body does crumble, it is also the only thing keeping me tied to this world. We cannot all live as mind alone,” Eris said.

“Would you like to?” Toland asked.

He kept speaking, but she interrupted, so the words were layered over one another.

“I do not think you would,” Toland said.

“You know I would not,” Eris said at the same time.

They looked at one another, gave wry smiles.

“But,” Eris said, “I miss Brya. My Ghost. I miss her because she kept me alive and young, but I also miss her because she was a kind and understanding companion, as insightful and energetic as a Ghost could be.” She moved toward the edge of the cliff, casting her eyes out for where she knew the invisible platforms that Brya might once have discovered floated. (How terrible, that these mysteries had outlived that one particular Ghost.)

Toland’s voice was distant. He had not yet left the rill where he had been standing. “You are gracious in your grief.”

“But, to be precise, she was not part of my body, and she does not…I wish she was here, but she is not. Do we have to eat here? I would like the satisfaction of something salty.” _Chips._ Eris Morn wanted chips. And she wanted a bowl of ramen with an egg in it, the broth seeping into the egg, and chewy cabbage. She wanted Brya back. And she wanted Toland, and none of these things were easy, even though the last one was—

Toland walked beside her, carefully stepping over the rills of water so as not to get his boots as wet as his shoulders and back already were. “What a strange dream for the Witch-Queen to concoct. Why does she even let us live long enough to ask these questions? We will break her simulation. We are not Guardians, so we will not break it by merely existing, but we will find every possible way we can to break it. And we are clever. Why set us a clever puzzle?”

“I believe that is the answer.” She straightened, readied herself as if giving a lecture. She could gesture with her Ahamkara bone, green flaring out around it. She could take a deep breath to fuel the authoritative words. Speaking them did not give her heartsease, but did remind her of the one thing that had never changed: her control over her own persistence. Nothing, not in the wide universe beyond or the universes inverted inside the mundane one as small as a pebble, had ever stopped her momentum for long. “Did you ever know? Was it revealed in your time? Savathûn feeds on secrets. The more we search, the more we strengthen her.”

“I did not know,” he said quietly. It was amazing that he admitted that. Eris did not want to comment on it lest he take any comment as an insult and think that such openness was not appreciated.

Maybe she should thank him. What is the worse that could happen? He could walk away, but she had found her way without him many times before.

“Thank you for your honesty, Shattered One.”

He made a small noise of agreement.

Eris looked out across the canyon. She knew small tunnels on the other side lead to worm-gardens. The musical sound of water soothed her. The antechamber in which they stood lead to a large, locked door, and she hoped that nothing would come rampaging through it just as she was beginning to understand what was happening. 

“I think these are the challenges she has set us, to stall us. Instead of crystals, she has hidden the keys in the very architecture. The invisible bridges would be impossible to discover without a Ghost, normally. She does not know that I can approximate one with the scrap of bone and magic that saw me through my time in the dark. Another challenge are the enemies here. We have seen only a few wizards, but cannot assume that she did not make the ranks of Knights, thrall, Ogres, and others who patrol this space in the dimension in which we were born.”

“Three riddles for two travelers. Who before us was ever more ready?”

Eris gave a tight smile that matched the victorious tone in his voice.

She held out her Ahamkara bone again. As always, it was wreathed in green fire, a perfect sphere that resembled a Ghost when its Guardian was temporarily dead. Sometimes, especially when she had first arrived at the Tower the second time, after the pit, she had wondered whether the presence of the bone had helped Guardians be less repulsed by her than they would otherwise have been. Certainly, many still had not trusted her and did not trust her today. Those who thought she was weak but did not know how to claim that about someone who had clearly survived so much, defeated anything the Hive had throne at her, stolen the power of Oryx from his flagship, and gone toe-to-toe with the Witch Queen. They did not know how to re-write this history, and so called her a witch herself instead of revealing the obvious lie of calling her a coward.

Maybe more people would have been like that if she had not held anything at all when she returned. The disfigurement of her eyes was bad enough: would she be a Guardian without a soul as well? Would she be an uncomfortable reminder of morality?

She heard from Ikora that civilians were allowed in the Tower now. Both they and Guardians had to deal with the discomfort of living with mortals and immortals respectively, with all the better grudges and lingering horror that implied from both sides.

Or perhaps the bone, which even the Vanguard had not known for what it was, looked like a Ghost in perpetual crisis and created even more horror for the little drones. Eris had never been close enough to the networks Ghosts made among themselves to know whether they had their own gossip about her, about Brya.

Some Guardians reacted with horror when Eris returned, and surely some Ghosts reacted with horror of a different sort when they saw the Guardian had returned without her Brya, that one person had escaped the Pit and it had not been one of theirs. Brya would have had her own friends, her own past times. All gone now, as silent as Ophiuchus, who, if he remembers Brya at all, does not say.

Eris could see the hidden pathways across the gap by the light in her gloved hand. In front of her, Toland took the jump carefully, with outstretched arms. Eris jumped onto one of the flat, onyx platforms that unwrapped like a gift, its golden edges tearing through the air until they solidified like cooling lava.

Progress was slow for the two mortals. Eris had to steel herself before each jump. But she had done this before, knew the force and balance, had been well acquainted with force and balance her whole life. With skill like this she had plunged a sword into the brain of an Ahamkara, once. 

They were almost at the opposite side of the canyon when the platform disappeared under her feet.

She fell. She could hear the soles of Toland’s boots, distant and still receding, as they thumped onto the solid ground on the other side of the great artificial canyon. If he cried out, the sound was lost in her own mournful cry, which escaped her mouth inadvertently. She landed on something hard, which jolted through her hips. As she tried to take in a deep breath her body bubbled, rebelled, laughed, the sound grotesque and inappropriate.

But she was alive. She could get her breaths to normalize. Dust had caked onto her skirt over her aching hip. She stood up, carefully, finding the Ahamkara bone still clutched in her hand. What a nightmare, this was! She had dreamed of living like this, when she was at the Tower and the tunnels and caves of the moon were beginning to feel like a bad dream or a goad rarely used. It was always there, the memories never fading, but there, at least, she had been able to know that they were memories, not reality. Now she was truly back where she had once been and where she had never wanted to go again.

A ledge clinging to the sloping side of the canyon had broken her fall. She was a long way down, long enough that the yellow glow from the ceiling dwindled. She could not see Toland, not from this angle or not because of the distance or because he had, as soon as she disappeared, started to walk away.

The thought fell sour into her stomach and made her nauseous. This had been just how it had been in the tunnels! Sick, obsessed with clutching the bone that had been her only source of supernatural power, hungry, alone.

And determined. She still had a chance. She could still breathe and stand, and those things injected something like the Light her Ghost had given her.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Eris finds new ways to break the simulation, and Savathûn notices.

Looking up, she could see she was far below the floating shards of rock. She felt along the wall for a handhold. This was possible to climb. Hive made things so wonderfully textured. Spikes could be as good for handholds as they were as defenses. It was dark but not so much that she could not see, especially with her eyesight used to dim, green shadows.

The wall ended in a shear change. Beyond the change, it kept going. She could even see texture in the distance. But she had reached a part of the wall that was unquestionably different from the others.

The wall was smooth to the touch. Like glass, it reflected gray and white spots of light as well as the dark olive-yellow of the surrounding canyon. Because the canyon was clearly part of the planned architecture of the Dreadnaught, Eris did not have trouble thinking of it as a room instead of a landscape. Everything on the Dreadnaught was organically grown from the skeleton of the original worm, or had been recycled from organic material. (The Hive certainly had enough dead.) The whole place was like a cathedral made of skeletons, every corridor a catacomb, beautiful and macabre. Compared to that, this wall looked unnatural. Eris touched it again, then flattened her palm against it. Was this something built by the Vex? Did it look like Quria’s gate in Oryx’s throne world? No. There were no features at all, no seams, no mechanical parts she could identify.

It was as if Savathûn had stopped building the dream at this very line.

If there was a hand-hold there, it would make Eris’ job a lot easier.

And then there was. The texture of the wall extended outward into a dusty horn, crusted with barnacles, just like any wall on the ship. Alarmed by her past escape, the Witch-Queen had changed the world in which she trapped Eris. This one was like putty, waiting to be formed. That must be why Eris had not found any pink crystals in this world. _Any_ part of the false Dreadnaught could change it. Whether those changes also fueled Savathûn was … a question Eris would like to answer when she was again standing on solid ground.

She started to climb. The spur of the Dreadnaught she had created was a good first step for her hands and then her feet to find purchase on. It had been a long time since she had climbed on a vertical surface like this, and it was precarious. The wall was steep enough that she considered herself lucky it never became inverted over her head. She tested each handhold carefully. But she knew well how to climb. When she got high enough that a fall would probably be fatal, she had also reached the height of the invisible paths. The most frightening, most dangerous part of the operation was when she put her fingers inside her opposite gauntlet to find the pocket where she kept the Ahamkara bone and withdrew the sliver. She considered for a moment before putting the shard in her mouth, careful not to touch it with her tongue. It was this or falling. The green light filled her vision, but she could twist the shard around enough that she could make it cast light in front of her enough to see by.

She jumped to the nearest floating platform. Only three were between her and the cliff. Standing in the middle of the air was just as frightening as climbing up the wall, in a different way. When she reached the next ledge, balancing carefully and breathing in deeply before she jumped, feeling the blur and rush of wind over her covered ears—

There was another one there to catch her.

When she stood solidly on ground that created itself under her feet, she saw that Toland had not left her after all. At this angle she could see him leaning over toward the canyon. She spat the Ahamkara shard onto her palm and called his name. “Toland!”

“Eris!” His reply echoed.“It is not your turn to leave me. Not yet!”

His encouragement helped her jump from platform to platform with quiet certainty. She reached the nearest platform to the cliff side, now in hailing distance. She _had_ missed him powerfully. Both of them had been lonely in their very different exiles, hadn’t they? Both of them had been finishing one another’s sentences, re-writing letters over and over in their heads without sending them. She hated _missing_ him, hated how familiar that feeling was. And now, there was a chance that she would not have to miss him today.

But this was not the time to examine those feelings, and besides, neither of them knew how to broach them in an alien place where … what would happen next? Would he go back to being a lightning sprite in the Ascendant Plane? Eris would go back to trying to push the Hive off the Moon. There could be no shared trajectory for them, not in the long run.

“That platform should not have disappeared. I watched them. You stood on it no longer than you did the others, did not step too far,” Toland called.

“I know. She seeks to delay us. Perhaps?” She had been certain, but as soon as she spoke the words realized she did not have proof for them. She jogged across the ledge and jumped to the cliff side. Relief made her muscles feel loose and watery.

“I think we can add anther challenge to the list,” Eris said without preamble when she reached him. Without preamble, no, but she remembered—and felt a certain heaviness—at ‘It is not your turn to leave me.’

“What challenge is that?” Eris said.

“Definitions.” Toland said.

Eris agreed immediately. “Yes. With the Witch-Queen it is always this way.”

“And there is more evidence for it than before. There are no crystals here, after all.”

“I know. When I was down there, I found a blank space in the world and re-defined it. This is a simulation, and it is incomplete. I created something new from the raw material she used. This means we can change this world.”

A slow smile spread across his scarred face. “She left her door open, and you have walked right in while she is away. Brilliant.”

“I would never have seen it if I hadn’t fell. Still, there is reward in the hidden places,” Eris said.

Toland radiated approval. He had looked just like this when he had become comfortable with Eriana—comfortable enough to mock her, he had been. Eris would not stand for that. She waited. Perhaps it was not so surprising that what he said next was careful and kind. Being the Hive emissary had done something to him; made him perhaps more polite, more sure of his role, but also more understanding of how he would never have gotten so far as he did without Eriana and Eris. “Tread lightly, Eris. To lose you to a fall here would be …”

“In her game, we only die if she permits us,” Eris said. The game the Witch-Queen had set was infuriating itself. But ‘tread lightly’ settled in Eris. It wasn’t a lesson Toland needed to learn for himself. He tread so lightly he had left the mortal plane. It was something he said only to try to protect her.

“So we will not die. Be careful,” Toland said.

“And you say this, you who have only had a body for two days.” Eris looked him up and down. “Are you used to your feet?”

He bent down and touched his toes. “Quite so.” He stood up, tipped his head like an inquisitive bird. “Has it been three days? One in the Tower, one here.”

“One day in a library, in another Tower, before this. Did you see that world? Or simply the one where you were an emissary?” Eris asked. Had the Toland in the library been a real person? Or had the Witch-Queen experimented with him being a trick too?

“No. I was the emissary for three days. I slept once in the Moon fortress.” Toland looked up at the ceiling as if searching for a distraction.

“Strange. She twisted us each into our own worlds, each designed to trap us individually. And then brought us together. Perhaps she underestimated that we would recognize each other. Did you wonder where I was, that first day?”

“I thought you were in the Tower. I worried you were dead,” Toland said.

He _worried_. And yet had done nothing about it. Perhaps that was why he looked chagrined. Well, Eris had not searched for him first either. The power structures of the new world were her first priority. She supposed the same could be said of him, if he had been involved in the upper echelons of the alternate Witch-Queen’s Moon.

“One thing we can agree on. Stay by my side. The Witch-Queen will use you if she can. And …” Eris hesitated. _I must be reassured you do not want her to._ “I fear she will be very persuasive, when it comes to making the Hive into an image that intrigues you.”

He laughed, quiet (restrained, trying not to be heard) but enthusiastic, cackling. “You are wise, dear Eris.”

“Only observant, dear Toland.”

The endearment surprised him enough that he almost bristled like a startled cat. Eris smiled. Her limbs were heavy with exhaustion and fear after climbing up the cliff. Demanding that they sleep now would be awkward in comparison to the jovial conversation, Eris thought, but she was used to being the one who did not read a conversation, between the Vanguard or other Guardians, or who stopped it in its tracks. She did not know another way to be, and this one had served her well enough so far. She was not afraid of what Toland, of all people, thought, although it did appease her to think that her proclamations were exactly the kind of communication which made the most sense to _him_.

“If we do not want to die of exhaustion before the Witch-Queen can kill us, we should take a rest. A real one,” Eris said.

“Did the embrace of the brood jelly not refresh you?” Toland asked.

“… _Brood jelly.”_ Eris replied in disgust.

“Yes.”

“I will kill the Witch-Queen for this alone,” Eris said. “We are not her children. She cannot baptize us so. You are right, here and now. If we can re-code this world—”

The world changed.

Something slapped Eris out of waking and into dream. It was not an easy transition like the ones between worlds had been. As disorienting as they had been, they had been comfortable, and often she woke up to pleasant sights. This was a formless dream, impressions of teeth and pit and flayed skeletons always behind her even as she could see nothing clearly.

_Toland?_

The voice that answered was familiar: deep as Oryx’s, echoing between green and blue Doppler-shifted stars and between supernovae exploding in slow pulses of force.

Savathûn had decided to address her personally.

_The Tower was burning._

_The worm was in tatters. It had fallen in the city, drowning blocks of buildings in swaths of translucent jelly and green skin. Ikora, Zavala, and the Mithrax had immediately gone down to the city, and there had been immobilized by Hive carrying chains fit for a starship._

_Eris knew this was not a complete world, knew she had not been taken to a new non-place, because she could not feel her own body. As in a dream, she and the world around her were indistinct, unimportant except for the image of the Tower’s leaders chained to a house’s front columns._

_“None of this is real,” Eris said, and found she could speak. Her voice echoed into the dream-space._

_An Ogre lumbered into the square. The Vanguard struggled. Eris fixated on the flush on Ikora’s cheeks, the way Zavala’s hands squeezed open and shut. Once his fingers scrabbled at each other as if he was trying to tear into his own armor. Eris did not know Mithrax as well, could not focus on him so intently, but saw the colors of Cayde’s cape stark against the tan walls of the house as he struggled with all four arms against the cursed chains. In the way of dreams, she could hear nothing except her own voice._

_A ball of tension weighed down Eris’ sternum. Her mind buzzed._

_“Does this not exhaust you?” Eris screamed. “Inventing tortures? Are we such_ honored _prisoners that you would do such work for us? My applause and disgust, Witch-Queen. I hope we_ waste _your eternity.”_

_The Ogre fired, filling the square with violet light._

_“You are right,” Savathûn said as the Vanguard she had dreamed into existence died. “This is not truth.”_

_She paused._

_The scene changed._

_“Here is the truth,” said Savathûn._

_Eris saw her own body hanging mid-air in the Ascendant Plane, her back arched. She saw the ball of lightning that was Toland, frozen. It looked like a still image, flecks of light caught in mid-drift as they orbited his empty core, but she could tell from the sluggishly moving fog behind him that he was trapped in some kind of stasis, just as she was._

_Eris would need to think fast. Did Savathûn want to buy time? If so, bantering with her here would just play into her goal. It was quite possible that Eris was not even speaking to the real Savathûn. Did the inventions recur, a false Witch-Queen speaking to a false Vanguard to a real Eris in a twice-false dream? Again Eris told herself she could not act as if nothing she saw had consequences. Some logic_ must _rule here. She simply had to break the game instead of playing it as Savathûn intended. And admitting that she knew the back door was not a good way to continue having access to the part she already knew she could break._

_“We could both win,” Savathûn said. Her casual tone disgusted Eris. “You and the scrap of thought will live. Stay here. Be comfortable. Discover the many things I have made for you."_

_“I will not run your engine. You live on curiosity. Exploring that world would just feed you.”_

_Savathûn changed the world again, folding it over Eris like a sodden blanket. For the span of a few breaths Eris was drowning in a dark, salty expanse—maybe the cold Bering Strait, maybe the endless swirl of the Pacific, maybe the slow methane soup of the moon Titan. Then Savathûn showed Eris the Traveler. Although it had been barely a day since she had seen it, it was a great relief, an almost worshipful gratitude she felt. What could Eris give it in exchange for what it had given?_  
  
But Savathûn did not focus on it. She showed it from Earthrise, the planet impossibly twisted so that the Traveler appeared top-down from the surface of the moon, with the jagged lunar mountains in front of it. Eris saw red towers sprout from the moon. Plant life blanketed it in seconds. In fast-forward, armies of Hive marched across the marae. Remnants of Guardian deaths and memorials scattered and flattened beneath their feet.

_Accelerating through time, the scene also sped through space, an obtrusive camera following the rising, impossible horde. For all of her subtlety, Savathûn was still as much of a conquerer as Oryx was. Even if she decided to forgo the swordlogic for another type of energy, the broods would boil from their caves. This was the way of what the Hive had become, of what their words did to them. Clever Savathûn, too, was gnawed by a purpose she could not control._

_Pity did not live in Eris, especially not as the violent vision darkened even further. Swarms blanketed the Earth. An eye blink and her viewpoint was down below the three-story houses of a street in the Last City, watching the Traveler break apart._

_No. Eris could not feel her own body, but she could feel horror. The inside of the Traveler was all machinery, struts and braces, places made by human feet to walk. Savathûn did not consider it or could not comprehend it as having been made at another scale. Or perhaps it had shaped itself to humanity. But whatever alien force had been pursued through space was now empty at the center, without a soul. No matter whether one had been there once and died or whether there had never been anything at all but a large and hideously powerful factory, churning out Ghosts which churned out soldiers, the Witch-Queen had destroyed it._

_The Traveler disintegrated. Pieces of the shell, croaking like old men on their deathbeds, tipped over into the city and raised storm clouds of dust and debris. Lamp posts, walls, and dirt plumed into the air. Eris wanted to raise her arms to cover her head, and managed a sensation of embodiedness which she grasped greedily. Could she take control of this vision again? As in sleep paralysis, she felt disconnected from all of her own parts._

_In the vision, Ikora and Zavala gunned sparrows down the street. Boots rang in a panicked march behind them. More Guardians, or Hive? Eris could not tell. Savathûn forced her to watch the Vanguard._

_This isn’t really happening_ , Eris insisted to herself. _You must keep one part of your mind disconnected from all of this, realizing that it is just a film, or a story. She has filaments in your mind, but you know how to separate perception from truth._

_“Without you, the Tower will fall, you know,” Savathûn said, her voice still deep and casual. Would a tyrant speak like this? Of course, Eris thought, Savathûn did not respect anyone enough to speak formally to them. Perhaps the worm gods had spoken the same to her._

_“I have already won.”_

_“Why bother to keep us alive?” It was a dangerous question, but she wanted a straight answer._

_“This way, your questions can feed me.”_

_This isn’t really happening…_

_Eris’ idea was right. She tried to console herself with this as she saw Ikora race into battle against a towering Wizard, or Zavala’s shield broken._

_Remember where you are!_

_Ikora died first. The blow was difficult to parse. Some skirl of unreality tornadoed out of the air and broke her into pieces. Savathûn did not let her get close. Eris wept without tears. How much of emotion is somatic? How much feedback from the body is necessary for grief? Can cut nerves tell the brain to mourn?_

_Eris watched Zavala react to Ikora’s fall. He had to keep moving—the legs of the Wizard, the green-scaled and black-oozing pillar-legs of Savathûn, were stamping around him in a slow, considered dance. She would bat her prey around between her paws like a lioness. His expression closed, stoney. He had looked like this after Xol’s re-emergence. Had he ever truly healed from Xol’s re-emergence? The armored Titan’s skin might as well have been naked and burnt raw. Finally, Savathûn pressed down on him, forcing the stony face into the dirt, drowning him in the land he had lived for thousands of years to protect._

_Eris could not look away._ It is not real, she insisted to herself. I am somewhere else. _But, overwhelmed, she had almost forgotten the false world of the Dreadnaught and the real world where Eris had marched into Savathûn’s throne world. Her confusion became a mantra she knew to cling to although she did not know why. Where am I? Where am I?_ _And where am I?_

_As if she had read Eris’ mind, Savathûn changed the scene back to the frozen tableau in the Sea of Screams—the overlay of the Ascendant Plane, not one of the fancifully named maria on the mundane Moon. Eris suspected this was the most real thing she had seen in days. Time seemed to have passed. Icicles and glaciers of white, crusting ice had formed on Eris’ back, on her face, where she still floated. Toland’s ball lightning form had become pale gray, as sickly as a pallor without the man behind it._

_Savathûn’s voice boomed. “Play all you want. Be curious. You cannot escape. I honor you with answers. Soon you will understand that. It is a gift, for me to leave you alone. Wonder: is what I have shown you true? Has it already happened? Will it never happen, and I have another plan for you two? Sleep well, Eris. That way, the nightmares will take a stronger hold.”_

_She said it with such warmth, each word growing more so until there was perhaps a terrible affection in her proclamations and threats._

And Eris woke up.

The barnacles and cracks studding the floor of the Dreadnaught were mountains and canyons. She lay with her cheek pressed against the ground. The blurry black form in front of her was Toland’s leg, where he kneeled close by and parallel to her. She groaned and sat up. He turned to her and extended a hand. She did not take it, and he graciously returned it to his side. He seemed to have been engrossed in examining a stalagmite in front of her, which grew out of the yellow-green lacquer into a spiraling tower about a foot high.

“Am I right in imagining you were just engrossed in bothering the witch queen?” Toland said.

“Like a crow to a hawk.” Eris smiled tightly, but thought that he could probably see the pain in it. Her right hip hurt where she had been pressed against the ground with no consideration for comfort. 

“Where should we fly next?” Toland narrowed his eyes.

“I was right. She is feeding off our curiosity, and every step here is curious.” She stood, painfully, while Toland remained kneeling. “But we cannot break out of the world. I hate this. I will destroy her for it.” Eris glanced at the pillar he had constructed. “Did you try to destroy as well as create?”

“Yes. I tried to dig. What is here cannot be removed, or at least, not by my initial attempts,” Toland said. “But I can make new parts.”

“Maybe that is the key.” Eris considered. “Imagine if we make something new. Something the Witch-Queen has already seen. We tell her a story she has heard before. We drain the battery ourselves. Make ourselves useless, so that we are more useful alive in the real world,” Eris said.

“And what if she simply turns us to crystal, as she did to Guardians on Titan? A beautiful fate, but perhaps not a very entertaining one,” Toland said.

Eris shook her head. “It is … remarkable that you can find that beautiful.”

“I glory in this, Eris. Every day is a vista. But … perhaps I should have consulted with you earlier. Are you hurt? Did she wound you?”

“Thank you.” Eris wrapped her arms around her own ribs. The ache on her hip was already fading. “We were right. She’s using us to fuel her viral language in her attempt to re-make the Hive. But she does not know, or does not care, that we can re-make things within this world too. We still have that power.” _We can re-play events she already knows, preventing her from seeing as many new things._ “And if we read to her texts she already knows … the battery will weaken.”

“Yes, yes!” Toland had a habit of not raising his voice when he exclaimed; instead of volume the proclamation gained a contained intensity that increased the buzzing undertone of his words. “And what texts does she already know?”

“The Books of Sorrow. Of course. She has the power here to create people. No, not people. Characters. Automata, like every person in the Tower from which we so lately came. I have read that dour book many times, finding horror and whimsy, comfort and anxiety. Its core characters are Savathûn herself and her siblings. So … to drain her battery … we will make them.”

“Bold.” Toland stood up to meet her eyes.

“I do not know enough from the clay we have sculpted so far.” Eris made a gesture at the stalagmite, her crooked fingers flung out as if casting a spell. “What did you learn from that?” She did not wait for an answer. “I do not think we can sculpt something from nothing.”

“No. Stone becomes stone, dirt becomes dirt.”

“Thrall become thrall. We can find newborns in the brood hall and turn them into copies of Savathûn and her sisters. We can re-play their lives, if we can just change this world enough. Remember, everything here is constructed. We will be changing a painting, not a life.”

“Re-making those lives also requires re-making Fundament, or traveling to it.”

“If we can re-create the thrall, mold living creatures to us, making a planet will be easy. Her very framework of this world will help us, as it is made in part from the Guardians’ memories, but only filtered through her own. She cannot work without seeing through someone else’s eyes. I believe this world will tend toward her own history. We will slide toward it as easily as a well-trodden path between neurons,” Eris said.

Toland smiled. “Re-make her world in her own image.”

“And I do not know whether she will discover our plans,” Eris said. “We cannot act as though she over-hears every word. She said nothing of the change I made in the canyon when I spoke to her just now, in that waking dream. Other conquests occupy her, and I imagine our Guardians are working to stop her as hard as we are.”

“We are lucky our positions are not reversed,” Toland said. “My Dante is not subtle. Her voice is the sharp bark of a gun, not this delicate construction. But if we get the chance to reach her—the real her, not some puppet—we can see what help she might bring. Power proves itself, and power she has in no limited supply.”

“Yes. The possibility that our Guardian knows what happened to us is a comfort.” ( _Our_ Guardian. She would have to consider that phrasing later.) Eris began to walk toward the tunnel that would lead them back to the fecund brood-hall, back toward the room she could not help but think of as the sealed-over breach. It had been healed by never having been struck at all.

“Long have I watched our Guardian wandering,” Toland said. “Her horizons are close but wide, like Pluto’s.”

“I know she would work to save me.” Eris remembered a meeting on the Reef, a gift of a shining-carapaced drone Eris had sent the Guardian to find. The Guardian had tried to say a great many unspoken things, shining in wide, green eyes. No matter how deep Eris delved, the Young Wolf had always trusted her. “Her relationship to you … I am not so sure.” She glanced over her shoulder at him to see whether there was any change in his cruel expression.

“If she knew I was working alongside you? She would do anything,” Toland said.

The reply had been unexpectedly selfless, and Eris turned away from him in comfortable silence.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eris begins to shape the thrall.

Oh, the contradiction of the Hive. Slaves all of them, driven by a hunger sloshing back and forth in their bellies, but it is not their hunger. These Worms, third-born and swept in an unseen brush of wind from the Garden, are the masters upon whom all this must be blamed and lauded. But here, too, all is not so simple. The Dreadnaught is the skeleton of a worm, discarded and used, edited by the scientists and sorcerers of the Hive. There is no contradiction in the Hive building a warship from the body of their fallen sovereign. Life and death mingle here as they do in a cathedral, holy and embalmed, or as they do in any warship, living blood and killing momentum. What fluids once sluiced through Akka’s spine?

Consider this, when it comes to the Hive: they are a virus. This is true. Given space, they expand to fill it, as humanity does. Is humanity viral? Is life? Perhaps, but this is too easy. Too reactive, a philosophy for teenagers still learning the length of their own limbs.

The Warlocks of the Order of the Kine Gorgon produced such scholars as Jaguilyne of the Tower, Kairush-17, and Terence Yield, who said, “Immortality must not be considered in conversations of Guardian philosophy, or those conversations become diluted beyond recovery. Time persists. No matter how long we live, now follows now follows now. Eternity is a conversation for psychologists, not students of the Light itself and the effects it has on those it embodies. Time is a noble study, but it is not the same as ours.

“Our study is momentum. Whether combat or experiment or embrace. Momentum exists within time but is not a function of it. The primary trait of Guardians is persistence, endless momentum. We are perpetual motion machines. This distinguishes us from our enemies.”

Terence Yield went on to say, Toland knew, that all of the Tower’s enemies as well as its mortal human allies were different from Guardians in their relationship to this momentum.

The ceiling of the Dreadnaught pressed heavily down on its halls. The only movement here was orbital: the ship moving within the rings of Saturn, orbiting while the planet itself rotated and orbited around the sun. The Dreadnaught had been parked in a stable orbit, and there it would remain, rock-struck and aging and cold. Every breath Toland took stirred a little life into the dead air. And here they were, approaching the brood hall not accosted, approaching the humid air of the eggs which he now knew so personally. A planned desert like the part of the moon known now as the Hellmouth, an ugly name among all the beauty of the maria: Mare Vaporum, Mare Cognitum, Mare Fecunditatis, Oceanus Procellarum, and the seas stripped of their names, the dark Mare Desiderii and the Mare Incognitum, now truly unmarked and unknown because it had been erased from the maps for the sake of consistency, accuracy, and clarity.

In front of him, like a queen with a guard, walked Eris. Watch the fall of her arm, the invisible line between her shoulder blades. Watch for what she does next: her mercurial pain, her core of diamond.

Through the worm-tunnels they crawled back to the brood hall. Once, in a yellow pool of lantern light, Toland was struck with a great urge to turn and show his belly to the Dreadnaught. What glorious surrender he would find here. He turned to see the fat, shining body of a worm wriggling into the dirt, pushing out of sight until it left only the dark specks of overturned, black detritus.

Eris reached for him but did not touch his shoulder. “Moods move here like weather,” she said.

Disturbed, Toland fumbled for words. “Simpletons might think the worms are happy, growing fat on instinct. I am not so lost as to surrender to an instinctual defense. Perhaps that is why they are called gods: their evolutionary mechanism is a kind of psychic worship influence, where they make other creatures roll over for them.”

Eris looked at him for a long time before he turned away and kept crawling.

He pushed his back against the wall just before the entrance to the brood hall. Two barnacles sloughed off the wall and fell to the ground.

Eris paralleled him on the other side. She leaned out to get a good look at the room. For a moment, her face was lit in orange, light pooling on her nose and creating a dot like a sniper’s sighting mark on her upper lip. “Three tasks are before us, each more hazardous than the last. Find three thrall. Keep the wizards from seeing us, or destroying us if they see us. Change the thrall.”

_I am not your Guardian, to be cautioned,_ Toland thought but did not say. It would not help their partnership, and he did not want to wound it. It was not tactful. It was something the Hive emissary under Savathûn’s public rule of the Tower would have the professional experience not to say. Instead, he said, “Do you remember where the thrall were when we walked here last?”

The air around him settled cold and humid, adding to the barnacles the sense of being underwater. But to breathe there was to be unable to be harmed by the obvious and persistent threat, and so comfort was also always around him, an anxious and flitting mind soothed by how very obvious the danger made itself. The Hive did not try to hide, and because of that, he could take them apart one at a time and at his leisure.

“Some thrall were hatching near the steps where we walked last,” Eris said. “Whether they will have been taken away between now and then or whether they are left to rest, I do not know.”

“They are ready to fight almost the moment they are born,” Toland said, the information rising up second hand as out of a well, Emissary-information he had not known in his third life but which bubbled up easily from his fourth. “Perhaps those have been moved. But the eggs near them will hatch soon after.”

“So we go there.” She shuffled, looked straight at him. The way they sat reminded him of soldiers in a caravan, or pilots in a ship: two people face-to-face, backs braced against the opposite walls of the trench, alone in terror. Had he known her when they were not afraid? Yes. In Eriana’s home, with life bustling around them: Sai, Omar, and Vell laughing, Eriana tall and foreboding and forever welcoming. Toland had approached all of them at different times, feeling out who he could trust, who shared his proclivities, who would not use him, who planned to all along to leave when the success of their mission was assured, as an excuse to leave in turn.

There had been other women he had wanted, and Ir Yût, yes, the truth in the rumor. And Eris, the want a banked fire too cool to call desire but too warm to avoid the comparison, the ideas, the weight of her regard. He had spent not an inconsiderable amount of time wondering whether he wanted Eris to annihilate him, as Ir Yût had. Desire and self-mutilation were welded to one another in him like iron in a chain. Yet when he had spoken to Eris in person for the first time in a long time, in the guise of the Hive queen’s emissary and then as one of the many versions of himself, his motivating factor had not been to throw himself on the blade of her regard.

He wanted to live now, yes, but nor had he wanted all along to die. He had wanted to change. He did not want to change now.

His lips were dry. He bit the inside of his cheek, worrying at the skin, relieved by the wet sloughing of loose flesh as it parted. How strange, to have such physical concerns again. He dragged himself back from an introspection that would lead him far afield, through matters of the body, through matters of wanting.“Did she impart to you any detail of whether it is possible for us to die here? I do not imagine she wishes to waste the crops she grows for fuel.”

“Pain registers here just as it would in truth.” Eris hugged her arms to herself for a moment. “I would not want to experience death with such accuracy.”

“Not as Guardians do? We know well it is possible to feel the life blood slipped away and to sit up again, refreshed, like rousing from bed on a rainy morning.”

“We will test the boundaries of the death the Witch-Queen suggests for us,” Eris said, and, crouching, she began to walk out, between the eggs, into the labyrinthine brood-hall.

In front of her, from the brood-hall rose a smell of spring growth and petrichor. Toland looked out as far as he could see, into the gooey, orange ranks of eggs. If this next generation of thousands of warriors died one hundred times, still the ranks of the Hive would crumble only a little. Even Toland did not know the intricacies of the Hive’ brood-keeping, of whether families were chosen to create the next generation or whether conscription was demanded of them if they happened to breed. He knew Hive understood the concept of consorts and mates, and that the mother morph was a form one of any other morph could take if one chose and was permitted the resources, except if one chose a neuter morph, which, like motherhood, was a permanent state. This brood hall and the others like it were places of care, but they were also places ankle-thick with blood, with thrall fed on worms that swam to the bottoms of their guts and took root there.

Eris crept close to the walls, practiced, her footsteps silent and her shoulders low. If anyone looked quickly at the brown armor plates covering her shoulders, they would appear to be almost the same color as the floor. Was that camouflage Eris had perfected in the pit? Or was it happenstance that she looked so shadowy against the rocks? In the darkness the texture of the chitin would obscure her silhouette even more. Once again Toland was filled with admiration and curiosity toward and about her. She crept among the eggs, inside of which he could occasionally see the shadow of a slate-gray form. The orange ranks of eggs glowed with an inner yellow light, their exteriors slick and reflective.

Toland tried to step precisely in Eris’ footsteps, knowing her shorter and more drab form was less likely to attract attention. The deep, dyed black of his robes was no less obtrusive than a bright color against the browns and olives.

“There.” Eris paused and whispered. Between a narrow gap, perhaps one of the same twisting routes the two of them had taken to cross the room earlier, he could see four eggs which had recently cracked open. Yellow and orange yolk soaked into the ground. The open bottom halves of the eggs gaped in various states of brokenness. And four thrall lay on the ground, their usually ashen gray skin highlighted with blue because of the thinness of their skin and the nearness of their blood. As they struggled up onto their bony limbs, the translucent brain cases began to glow. Without each thrall having distinct eyes, it was difficult for Toland to see them as living beings. Even he, with memories of the broods he had seen when he was an Emissary and the many that had flung themselves against the Crota fireteam in the darkness between the lanterns, his internal conceptualization of thrall was of individuals in just flashes. Thrall were a hoard, running toward their prey, a forest of gnarled hands and phosphorescent growth. These, he would have to think of as individuals.

Eris waved her hand, indicating he should keep following her. They worked their way downhill, past the places where the metallic clamshell white of the ship’s walls met the dirt-strewn floor. Finally she stopped behind a stand of tall eggs and whispered in his ear, close enough for him to feel her breath. “There are too many. Perhaps, from this side, we can go as they turn away.”

They crept further downhill.

This was a mistake. Toland realized a Wizard had seen them from the slope above when the screaming started. Two tattered ghouls, horned and cloaked in an exoskeleton that could have been mistaken for a human silhouette, immediately rose up out of the forest of eggs. Clawed hands pedaled the air.

“Eris,” he started to say.

She had already seen. She skittered away, further downhill but cutting across so that she could be hidden behind the eggs. If the Wizards were going to fire at her, they would be firing on the eggs too, and she seemed to be betting that it wouldn’t happen. An evocative decision, Toland thought, although he did not know why. No; she was using her unborn enemy as a shield, that was why.

Perhaps she had thought he would follow her right away. Perhaps their silent understanding as they crawled had lead her to think she and he would communicate silently like this, always. Perhaps he had been distracted by symbolism that did not exist, answers that would not write themselves out in neat lines.

Whatever the reason, it meant he did not follow as quickly as he might have. A Wizard crested a hill and swiped a claw at him like a bird. Pain flared across his back, and he felt suddenly covered in gooseflesh and sweat, his human body a horrifying exhalation of mucus and lifeblood. He backed up, hunched over against the pain. The Wizard pursued him but did not attack again, reluctant to hit any eggs.

He could put his back against one of the columns that held up the far-away ceiling. It didn’t seem safe. He dashed for the cave he knew existed inside the hill they had just descended. This was the opposite way from where Eris had gone, but to reach her he would have to cross a wide path between eggs, and at the moment it seemed foolhardy at best and and impossible at worst.

The Wizards had called in heavier armament. From the top of the stairs where he had so recently stood, Toland saw an ogre lumber into view. A purple lash of fire splashed onto the space he had been standing a moment before. Another hit the wall behind him. Then the attacks were a thunder, and he realized that in moving beyond the eggs he had doomed himself. The ogre did not have to try to aim here. It would simply fire, at him or at the wall, until it burned him alive or—

The wall of the ship cracked.

Inside was the white of cleaned human bone.

Ice crystals began to creep inside from the vacuum of space. Toland’s ears popped. The air did not pull him toward the wall, but a frigid wind crept in. The crack was so small that he could not see the stars through it. He felt sure that he head read once that one should either take a deep breath at the moment of decompression or hold one’s breath immediately, but he could not remember which. He took a tentative step closer to the cave, cold all the while, wondering where Eris was, wondering whether he could have fought back if he had the Light or a gun. The Ogre fired again. Now Toland could see the stars as the breach widened, sunlight sparking off the millions of rocks that made up Saturn’s rings, and it was cold, and purple light filled his vision.

He had no time to compose a final thought.

_Then he was in a dark place, black with a velvety purple undertone, and he again did not have a body, and he was thrashing like a man coming up from drowning, trying to cough, finding he had no lungs._

_“You seem to have died,” said Savathûn inside his head._

_Whatever you do, old man, Toland thought to himself, do not tell her we plan to stall her as long as we can until we can drain the battery we have become to uselessness. Eris—! Do not tell her about Eris. Do not make all Eris has done worth nothing._

_He could not see the Witch-Queen. He could move, and sight was a sense given to him, but no matter which way he looked there was nothing to see, just the black-velvet-purple horizon and a more matte black sky, with no stars at all except for the occasional flash which looked just like the blobs of color behind his eyes as he slept, once upon a time, just that light, just that thin._

_“Where am I?” He asked, to test whether he could speak._

_“You have died. Game over. Try again?”_

_“Yes, yes, try again!”_

_“How charming that you conform to my [garbled] so easily.” Savathûn said._

_What had that middle word been? It was all static and curves, a five-dimensional word, a word like a cage which he had been for a moment trapped inside. If his ears had picked up the vibrations his mind had not been able to understand their order, the chopped-apart-but-sealed-together fact of them._

_“I do so try to be gracious.” He stalled for time with the first words that came to mind. Guardians certainly listened well enough to proclamations like this, if they were rewarded. And the words had the benefit of being true. “Tell me, now that I have died again, what will happen to me? There are infinitely more strangely made vistas beyond the horizon of the body.”_

_“I can give any world to you,” the Witch-Queen said. “It does not strain my imagination, it does not tax my servers, it will not inflict error codes upon you. What world do you want?”_

_And she opened options to him._

_Eras flashed by in a second, but with all the clarity of reality. Where before, Savathûn had constructed worlds around Eris’ dreams and nightmares, she now did the same for him._

_One world: a return to who he had been as the Hive emissary. A throne for him to sit on and survey his domain, which was the Dreaming City. A wish-dragon with its horned head under his hand.Ir Yût with a chorus of adult Deathsingers and their apprentices, each crowned in bone of different elegant shapes. Ir Yût sang while he slumped in that throne, sated and immortal. The Hive would have eradicated the Awoken and changed their tall silver towers into tall black monuments. Toland would have a command, and a chorus to lull him to sleep when the fear, even now, began to convince him with its hideously persuasive words that he was in danger no matter the fortress in which he lived. He would rule here, but he would not have to_ manage _— that would be done by the Hive above and below him, and he would be safe in this sinecure among the deathless. Toland the Emissary, he would be called, and there would be no Guardians at all to remind him that he had once been known as the Shattered One._

_Or—another world resolved in front of or behind his eyes. (The difference did not matter or could not be determined here.) He thought at first that this world was very similar to the one in which he had been trapped first, the Hive-ruled Tower where he had met Eris. Gradually, sensation and image revealed the differences. This was the Tower before Crota, before Mare Imbrium. Everything was the same, perhaps built, terribly and invasively, from his own memories. Except—there was the difference. He watched as if on a video screen as he and Eris turned the corner of a high street, their faces uncovered, their eyes human. The street’s wide sidewalks gave them a comfortable distance from the hovering train that occasionally processed along the middle. The stones at the edge of the sidewalk were chamomile yellow, the silver of the buildings shining in the sun, the bark of the trees vibrant as if he could see the sap flowing underneath. His vantage point was far enough away that he could not quite see detail, a tantalizing distance to watch as, at the corner of the street, Eris raised herself on her toes to kiss him. He watched the blue fabric across her stomach meet the red-and-gold stitch of his. Their faces were lost behind the fall of his own hair. It had never happened. It could. It could happen now._

_It is not happening now! He wrenched himself back to the present._ She is playing with us. She is making obscene dolls out of us. She may do what she wants with me, but Eris—she must not be allowed to assault Eris in this way.

_He wanted that other world so badly. He wavered toward it, pulled by the chance to speak the things that had been unspoken for so long. But they should not be spoken this way. He had no moral qualm about living as a captive in a fantasy world. He would not be himself, would not be true to the feelings Toland had felt since he had been reborn in the jungles of South America, if he did not acknowledge and even enjoy that particular vice. But Savathûn had shown him a long-held truth he must at last admit to himself: that he would not trade a false Eris, or the euphoric singing of Ir Yût and her sisters, for the true Eris._

_If only he had admitted it earlier._

_“No,” he said to the Witch-Queen, and his voice only wavered a little._

_Perhaps his refusal opened up an opportunity for Eris. Perhaps she had been banging on the door all along. Perhaps she had picked the lock._

_Whatever the reason, hills sprouted around him. Ten hills became ten columns became ten fingers, complete with wrinkled prints and short, flat nails, but all the translucent blue of this primordial world. He could see the palms underneath his formless anchoring place. He became dimly aware that he was somehow floating in space just outside the simulation of the Dreadnought and in this proto-place at the same time._

_Eris pulled him away from Savathûn._

_As he followed her, he realized how she was doing it. She manipulated the very definitions Savathûn had used against them before. Rewrite, Eris told the world. Change. Change!_

_She said:_

**definition: Savathûn. Hive Wizard. Krill. Queen-in-waiting who chooses her own time of ascension. Feeds the Worms. Keeper of secrets. She who sees the sword-logic has failed her. She who creates perpetual motion machines. She who draws picture after picture after picture but does not look at the world beyond the easel. Sathona, the first to leave her siblings in an effort to make all of them more powerful through one another’s absences. She who insists broods be born, and they are born.**

_“And,” Eris said, “I know her name. I define her now.”_

_Eris might as well have struck the pin out of a grenade. All the vastness of Savathûn’s awareness turned toward her. Even though there were no directions and no eyes here, Eris had been seen._

_Eris took Toland’s hand and ran._

_It was as sweet as the kiss in the doubly-false vision. She guided him on lines of force, tugging at his wrists when he pulled away.The song ofIr Yût did not fascinate like the Hunter-cleverness or the learned, steady quickness of Eris Morn. Savathûn took potshots, strings of reality-altering ideas falling around the two of them like missiles from orbit. Eris danced in and out of the deadly streams, never faltering, never one edge of her clothing scorched by the ideas of her enemy. Toland watched her in awe and moved with her. They traced a curved path through realities, and just when he thought the missiles would surely close in on them from all sides—_

_Savathûn threw the two of them back into the Dreadnaught._

She did it in almost the same way Eris had grabbed him, although he could no longer classify any of this as visually understandable. Perhaps he did not have eyes and could not open them and would not have been able to discern what he beheld when he did. But he felt her claws rise up from under the floor of reality and their clawed tips curve back toward him and back toward her palm. He felt them close, stifling, and Eris’ psychic presence tucked herself against his side so easily, her shoulder under his arm and the curve of her hip brushing and then pressing hard against the back of his leg. Eris raised a hand in front of his chest, and that hand held a knife.

And then the simulation asserted itself again. He had a body again, and could feel stone cutting into his palms. The Dreadnaught’s walls curved around him. An ache in his gut at the thought of that kiss in the possible world, or that last stand which had not been the last stand after all. Toland lifted himself up onto his elbows and, exhausted, panted between his forearms into the dusty ground of the ship. He caught his breath as best he could. How tiresome to have a body. How beautiful the rapture of metaphor, the embrace of a false world.

Except that perhaps he would have to begin to think another way. Perhaps he had not sunk all of his costs into the work of removing himself from the world.

Still, he felt a glimmer of admiration for Savathûn. She had not been chasing him and Eris along, reacting to what they did. She had, except in that very last moment when Eris took command of the simulation, been in complete control. There was something so fulfilling, so satisfying about seeing her ascend. Perhaps Eris held some of this professional, hatred-laced respect for her adversary too.

He would soon have his chance to find out. Eris stood above him on a flaking stone stair. She reached a hand out. He thought at first that she would take his hand, then remembered her touch aversion, and waited to see what she would do. She beckoned him and lowered her hand again, imperious and expressionless.

“The Wizards,” Toland said, regaining command of a voice that felt untrustworthy. “What happened to them? And to the Ogre?”

“Gone,” Eris said.

Toland climbed to his feet. The brood hall was quiet. Why wasn’t the air rushing out any more? He turned to see where the small breach had been, frightened of what he might find there. It had simply scarred over, as if a person had walked over there, over the hard-packed art on the outskirts of the brood-nests, and sealed up a maybe foot-wide, zig-zagging crack in the wall with translucent silver glue.

“You killed the brood wizards?” He asked.

“I killed them both, with the magic left to me and a spear made from bone, pronged at the end and used to move the eggs.” She stood tall and picked up the bone-white spear from behind her. From below he he could see the way her weight tilted on her hips. It was so easy to imagine brushing his fingers across her legs. She had a rakish splash of red blood across her cheek, mingling with ichor. “The Ogre disappeared. The Witch-Queen re-wrote it, or forgot it. But it’s possible it may return. Hurry. We will find those thrall!”

Toland trudged up the hill, scattering small rocks behind him and still looking over his shoulder at the sealed breach as if it would open again at any moment. Now was the time. Now had to be the time, or the rest of the day would be filled with experimentation try to get these thrall copies to work, and he knew better than anyone that both he and Eris would get so lost in that experimentation. It would be the way it had always been, two people devoted to the same curiosity (but not always to each other). The Witch-Queen had given him the opportunity to always hold that curtain between them and to have her anyway, and he had turned it down.

He reached the top of the hill. Slight dizziness struck him, from, he hoped, his time in the no-place of Savathûn’s regard. “Eris, I — I need you to know what she offered me. I’ve seen your heavens, or your hells.”

Her eyes widened. She waited expectantly. “I saw only the end.”

“She offered me a world where I would be the Emissary again, and have power over the Hive and over the Deathsingers. She offered me a world where — I do not know whether the Crota attack never happened, or some eternal time just before it. Where you and I were partners in all ways. I turned it all down, because it was not real, but also because the real you waits here, cold and singular as the stone that shares your name. This is the currency I refused to sell my soul with.” It was not difficult for him to say those words. They were true, and he accepted them, and the idea of consequence was itself secondary to the now in which she kept looking at him.

Then her lips quirked in a smile. “You didn’t flee into a dream,” she said. “You did not leave me when you had the choice.”

“As you have done the same. Your loyalty to the Vanguard, to the Guardians … it would have been easier to shun me than to answer even one letter.”

“Sometimes, it was.” Eris chuckled. “The Guardian would listen. She would return my words to me in better, brighter shapes. But I missed you, Toland. You. The lofty way you saw things, the desire that the sword-logic was true so that it could explain how you never allowed yourself to rest.”

_Was that right? That was almost right. That was so close to being right, but the words were not perfect. They did not open new avenues, instead of describing the road that was always, and had always been since his rebirth, so tangible right in front of him._

She was waiting for his reaction to such honest and pitiless words. If he interpreted the slump of her shoulders and the deepness of her voice correctly, she had not entirely expected to say any of it.

He pressed his lips together and shook his head. Both were delaying tactics, but both were also indications of how he really felt. He had never been very good at hiding his thoughts behind his face. Finally, he decided on, “And I missed you like the worm misses the gut.”

“We must find those thrall before anyone else comes to see what chaos has just unleashed.”

Toland nodded in agreement. Eris turned and began to wind her way between the eggs again. Now that there was no reason to hide, she passed some eggs that were taller than either of the two humans, and some that were still small, the size of a football. The broken nest at the top of the hill was still there, and unguarded, four thrall walking in small circles in the remains of the gooey, orange eggs. Eris knelt in the dirt by the baby thrall and held out her hand to them, brushing her fingers together as if she was calling a cat.

The thrall did not pay attention to her. The circle tightened, the little translucent shoulders turning away from her offered gloved hand. _Do not let them bite you,_ Toland thought but did not say.

Instead, one thrall tumbled over onto one another. At first, and for just a second, Toland thought that it had been a mistake, a childish trip, a small and top-heavy creature learning how to use its spindly, jointed legs. That was not the case. The mouth opened onto a disturbingly human-looking U-shaped row of the same small, tall teeth that were exposed at the front of the mouth. One of the thrall bit the other through the back of the neck.

Blue blood welled. Immediately, the other thrall turned and followed the scent of the blood. The three of them swarmed the fourth, piling onto it so that the fourth sibling could no longer be seen. The newborn thrall were hip-height to a human and Eris had to step back to avoid being kicked by their flying feet. Toland wrinkled his nose in distaste at the violence, then knew that he should not have been surprised. Thrall were the product of generations and generations of Hive who had followed the sword-logic and bred for violence. Even though these little ones did not have worms, they were still eager to spot weakness in any other being as a matter of course.

The death—and consuming, if the sounds were any indication—of their siblings was both instinct and carefully manipulated likelihood. Was this tenacity what had allowed them to survive through war after war and their journey through the stars on a mission of conquest? Or was it a liability, the thing that had left them on the Guardians’ doorstep kicking and screaming, grabbing some victories but ultimately as orphaned as a baby?

He looked to Eris for guidance and her opinion. She glanced at him, then back down at the thralls, her expression unreadable. “I will change them while they are distracted,” she said softly, her deep voice lowered so as not to disturb them. He wondered whether any Wizards would roam over the eggs again soon.

“Time grows heavy,” he said, matching her tone. “Make them ours, you who were once a Hunter. Forge this new path. For if we cannot change them, what hope do we have of finding another story we can re-create so easily? Shall we tell the Witch-Queen fairy tales?”

_Ours._ As soon as he said it he wondered if it was too much. He himself had not considered that he might be, in a sidelong way, one of the parents of the new creatures theThrall were going to become. But Toland was not one to apologize or even to back down from being too much, from saying too much. This was different. This was a kind of contract.

Eris shuffled forward and stretched her hands out over the Thrall without looking back at him. Beneath the moving bodies of the three Thrall he could see the ribs of the dead child, hardly more skeletal than it had been before it had died.

“A fairy tale indeed,” Eris said. “You are the reader-who-seeks, and I am the monster who keeps the tower.”

_The beauty and the beast._ But she emphasized the action, both characters _doing_ something, no one constrained by the story but rather active within it. And it was a love story. She still would not look at him. He bent down, sitting catty-corner to her with his hands between his knees, their clawed pose mirroring hers. Cold and a sensation of tightness swept through him. They would have to talk about this. One would have to ask the other, and not touch. Not yet.

Eris began to shape the thrall.

As she changed them their skin grew thicker, their heads more closely resembled human proportions, and the glow in their translucent skulls concentrated into three places to make a semblance of eyes. Pity they are so different, Toland thought. Why not keep them the same? Thrall they are, and thrall they should remain. But perhaps Eris was not well-practiced enough yet for her own perceptions not to have to leak into what she created. His work in creating merely a stalagmite had been laborious, requiring intense concentration and an artist’s focus on angle and material. Each part had many distinct sections. And Eris was trying to change something en masse, and to change a living body which knew what she was doing to it.

The world began to blur. Toland saw the outline of the Cabal ship he was used to in the Dreadnaught in the real world re-appear over the ranks of waiting eggs. “Eris?” He reached blindly to try to tap on her shoulder, but was not close enough, and remembered her aversion to touch just quick enough to curl his fingers in as she turned. “Eris!”

“The world is breaking,” Eris intoned. “She tries to bring it down around us, to move us to another place. I must finish this change, Toland. Without it, we are back where we began. Help me to fix this. And I will shape the engine that drains the battery.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eris finds herself the guardian of the Osmium princesses.

Eris was layering truth over lie over truth. From the thrall as they were: their skittering speed, their predatory honing skills, their gut-deep understanding of the Hive’s long history. Over them she placed what she knew of Aurash, Sathona, and Xi Ro, their soft childhood in the halls of the ever-more-distant Osmium King, their curiosity, their deep love for one another. For love it had been that had taken them into the Deep.

These thrall did not have worms, something she had not considered before this moment. All Hive had worms, from the smaller parasites carried by the grunts to the alien sovereigns who ate the entire tithe. So what was the use in knowing the difference between Hive-sense and worm-sense? For now, she cataloged the loose place, the chitin made to hold the worms in a pouch, as just another part of the thralls’ species anatomy. As she worked, re-creating definitions, she lost sight of the brown dirt littered with white barnacles and orange egg pieces. She lost sight of the thrall themselves, which had gone still and quiet, frozen on their feet or on tiny hands and knees.

**Definition: Aurash. Bold leader. Wiling to try to solve all problems put in front of her. Taught that she will succeed.**

Such human images came to mind: children excelling at sports, bullies discovering their weight, the way it felt to hear an adult’s praise. She reined these thoughts back. Adding too much humanity would contaminate the experiment, make the Hive something they had never been. They needed to be krill to their bones.

**Definition: Sathona. Riddle-follower. The spark of a puzzle coming together, the satisfaction of a task well done. A leader, a liar-in-wait, a sister who categorizes her love and feels it just as deeply.**

**Definition: Xi Ro. Fighter, wall-breaker, kings-spawn. A sword in the hand of a babe.**

_They are going to be so difficult to live with_ , Eris thought. _I cannot make them easier to handle, or they will not be exact copies and the Witch-Queen will draw power from them the same as if I had never conjured them at all._

Behind her, she could hear the stomping of heavy feet. Toland, mortal Warlock, would not last long without her if the Witch-Queen was beginning to tear this world up to get at her. Savathûn must be irritated, high in her immortal throne realities away, at how Eris escaped each trap more quickly. Eris smirked at the idea, and that bit of earned-and-enjoyed triumph slipped into her re-creation of the Osmium princesses too, and it was the verisimilitude they had been missing.

Eris opened her eyes.

Toland was crouched beside her, his mouth set in a thin, grim line. He took a deep breath and spoke in a calm, measured voice. “The Dreadnaught is falling apart.”

To back up his words, a chunk of tan chitin plummeted from the ceiling and, with a booming sound, crashed onto the ground in the midst of a cluster of thrall eggs. Rock and orange goo scattered into the air and rained back down. Worry turned Eris' stomach. Now that she had completed and taken the full brunt of the effort of transforming the thrall, of using Savathûn’s own game against her, it hit her how uncertain was the next stage of the plan. Would Savathûn change the world entirely, again? How does one flee from the creator of the game one must play? Eris had already seen that Savathûn did not monitor everything she did, or she would have cracked down on the newborn thrall instantly. Perhaps Toland’s near-death had distracted her.

She looked back at the newborns. They were sitting attentively in a row, arms flopped loosely in their laps. Her transformation had worked. All three were nearly identical and clearly not thrall any longer. They had transformed into something less skeletal but equally thin, more gossamer, not as top-heavy. Krill. The word had come down to humanity translated over millions of years, and it was only accurate in a sidelong way.

The room shook again. Eris looked up to see colors warping, landscapes stretching and snapping back. The downed Cabal ship creaked and hissed, engines cooling, new as the inside of an egg.

“We have company!” Toland stood between the ritual and the ship, hands loose and helpless.

“That ship is a new, half-made thing. Still warm from the fires. Make it ours,” Eris said.

She watched him go, disappearing over the side of the hill. The Hive children opened their mouths but did not speak. Bioluminescent fronds glowed behind them, whiskers or tendrils topped with blue like the arms of bait stars.

“Come, children,” Eris said. “Follow me.”

They did. In confusion and haste, the earth creaking and snapping around them, Eris lead them like ducklings across the burnt earth. Inside the Cabal ship she stepped across the wide, iron threshold into a narrow, black cloth cabin. Toland was fighting the Witch-Queen’s attempt to change the world with a memory of Eris’ own ship. It morphed and flowed around them. The children— princesses — sisters — whatever they were now — huddled near the wall, and she noticed how quickly they supported one another; a hand across one’s bony back, another’s narrow shoulders. They could have disappeared into the darkness of the wall if not for the blue glow. She would command them like she commanded Guardians—expecting chaos, giving firm love. She had not spent much time with children and did not know how to begin now, but she needed them alive, for the plan. Would they need to eat? Would she need to mold them into the sisters they had once been?

She could at least solve the first problem.

“Finish the ship,” she shouted to Toland, who was bent over the controls like a pilot but not making any move to start a warm-up sequence on the ship that was still blurring and re-forming itself around him.

“I will,” she heard as she ran back out, down the narrowing ramp.

The eggs were gone. The landscape that had been so alien had been replaced with the more familiar tumbled hillside of the Cabal beachhead. The breach in the wall seethed and changed, one simulation trying to assert itself over another. She knew where wormspore grew from long-dead corpses here, where the dead made the ground more rich. She darted to the first of those places and drew the thick stems out of the dirt. Wormspore’s roots were white and shallow, so delicate that they shed easily away. The bright yellow heads reminded her of the new krill’s spines.

_This for Xi Ro, who would hate me if she met me._

_This for Sathona, who became my greatest enemy._

_This for Aurash, whose son killed my best friend and her lover and our staunchest friends and the man who might have been my lover. This for the end of a Guardian generation. This for children with wide eyes and azure whiskers, children like princesses of the Osmium King, for whom Taox the traitor felt sympathy, but not enough. I must feel more. I must make them what they were, so that I can destroy what they became._

With each pull of wormspore the dusty smell of roots and bone filled her nose and mouth.

The Dreadnaught began to solidify around her. Her headdress caught a freezing wind and whipped against the side of her head. Over her shoulder, the breach opened up again. Her breath caught. Soon, she would have to leave. The wind or the Hive would find her. Even now she could see Knights cresting the hilltop, bone rifles smoking with green curse-fire. She coughed. Gathering three handfuls of wormspore to her chest, she retreated to the Cabal ship, which was now her ship instead, its black outriggers and green gun mounts as familiar as any home.

She wove her way through the cargo hold and the module where she had once lay a mattress, and finally to the narrow cockpit. A place for a single pilot jutted out like a hawk’s beak. Toland sat surrounded by blinking green lights, reaching for the controls to get the measure of them, the ship curving over him.

Eris clutched the back of the seat.

“She will abandon this simulation entirely before allowing us to wrest control of it,” Toland said. “We’ll be fools in her claws unless we ride the next wave and re-write the world to the one we want. Fundament’s waters must swallow us. Convince yourself, Eris. Make that truth stronger than whichever one she is concocting at this very moment, or all of our work is lost.”

Eris clutched her head. How to make Fundament out of nothing, when she did not even know what it looked like beyond the descriptions in the Books of Sorrow? The Hive princesses would know better than her. But _she_ had imagined _them_. Would her creations know what she did not? They would have to, or else they would not be correct simulacra of themselves, and the whole plan would come crashing down.

She folded her legs under her and sat by the trio of thrall. Three fates, three muses, three princesses each destined to play a different role in the downfall of an evil queen. “Hello, princesses. I am Eris Morn. I am here to assist you, and to beg your assistance. What can you remember?”

She felt the ship turn and rise under her. It had been a long time since she had heard that particular note, yet it was intimately familiar.

“We want to go home,” said one of them. _Want_ , not memory, pulled her.

“Which are you?” Eris asked.

“Sathona,” said another. She tweaked one of the whiskers on her sister’s back. “She lost the end of her spine to a stormjoy. I’m Xi Ro.”

Xi Ro, the largest, and Aurash, the smallest, sat next to one another. Eris could hardly hear the whispered word of Aurash saying her own name.

How strange, to see them here, so much smaller than she was and so much smaller than they had been. This was Sathona, her great enemy. This was Aurash, whose son had taken everything from her. Except they were also not. They were specks of potential, lines in code. Her stomach turned.

They tipped their heads, and it settled again.

Their round heads, small teeth, and the waving fronds on their backs all combined to give them the impression of soft dolls pulled from the sea, covered in barnacles and seaweed. Round, black eyes like a contented cat’s peered intelligently out of round faces. Their skin shaded from blue-silver to white, with their curling tendrils sometimes shading to pale green before terminating in the neon blue ends. She could easily imagine gossamer wings sprouting from their backs.

This was not what the krill had looked like in their, long, long, extinct history. Or, at least, Eris could not ever be sure how much of their appearance would be recognized by the historical krill and how much was of her own design, shaped by her hope and her imagination.

And they were cute. She liked to look at them, at the waving tendrils and round bodies. They were hers, because she had made them, and they belonged to themselves, because this world spun out possibilities on its own with the slightest nudge. Eris smiled.

The children had been waiting.

“Where are we going?” asked Xi Ro.

“We’ve never been this far away,” said Sathona.

“We’ve tried,” said Aurash, with somber determination. “We chase stormjoys out beyond the engines. We want to build things and see places. Is this a place?”

“Space is a place,” said Sathona, not unkindly. “We’re past the moons now.”

Eris did not correct her. Instead, she concentrated on what she had created them for: to drain the Witch-Queen’s energy enough that Eris could reach right pas her into the workings of the world. 

In front of each of them formed a small, pink crystal.

Eris smiled wider. It had been a long time since she had smiled so widely. She wondered what it looked like.

Ah, there they were. The keys to the Witch-Queen’s reality, laid bare.

“What are they?” asked Aurash, her voice tiny and whispering.

“I will tell you when my grim deed is done,” said Eris, and squeezed the first crystal between her fingers.

It fell into pink shards, then black dust.

“Resonances bouncing off the ceiling of the world,” Toland shouted, triumphant, from the pilot’s seat, and Eris knew that meant the plan was working. The metaphor followed through. She broke each crystal into nothing.

The children peered at the broken shards, then at her when they disappeared.

Eris folded her legs underneath her. “You are going to go on a journey with me. I will return you to your home.” She tried to force herself to say the words kindly. Wanted to be certain to say them kindly, but such sounds were unfamiliar to her mouth.

The floor rumbled as the ship lifted off.

“Thank you for your help.” Eris smiled again. Surely it looked faked or strained now, she worried.

“Where are we _going_?” Xi Ro asked again.

“Home, first,” said Eris. “I do not know where after.”

The three sisters looked at one another and did not protest. She showed them to a wide couch in what had once been a cargo room and was now her workshop. Imagination or the Witch-Queen’s world or something else meant that the room filled with Eris’ tools and souvenirs, as it had been in the real world. Although she had not seen the ship in years, all of it was familiar. It was as if she had gone away for a year and come back to find her room mostly untouched but with some things missing, some rearranged.)

She did not feel the need to tell them not to break anything, not to sit on the table, not to be krill children in any ways that surprised her. They curled up on the couch and set to muttering to one another.

Eris tried to ride the swaying motion of the ship into the cockpit. No room had been spared except for the single pilot; she had to stand in the hatchway and grip the back of the seat to stay upright. Outside the windows from where she had once looked with relief upon the Tower she now saw stars speckling space, and the dusty sweep of the edge of one of Saturn’s rings.

“It’s been a long time since I brought a ship to jumpspace,” Toland said, not looking at her. The ship hummed around him. A status sound chimed. “Any ideas?”

“Do not let us die,” Eris said.

Now Toland looked over his shoulder. For a moment his expression looked like that held by so many Guardians: the gentle puzzlement of _is Eris making a joke_? Then he saw her small smile and returned it and turned back to the controls, hesitantly but correctly pushing the ship past the speed of light. The universe became a smeared painting. Automated controls glowed green.

Toland sat back with a sigh of relief. The exchange made Eris feel more comfortable; it had been as if they were both human again. She stayed standing behind the pilot’s chair, her arms folded, watching the universe.

Toland turned with a rustle of cloaks and rested his arm on the back of the seat. “So, the children. Are they sapient?”

“No, but they will be extremely convincing. Unless ... well, if they become self aware how will we know? They will be my children. But I have seen the code of this game. They are automata. But very convincing.”

“I am convinced, dearest Eris.” His voice turned as soft as the heads of the wormspore. She remembered when she had taken his hand in the no-space, the dream, the code that made the world.

The star lines dissipated.

Eris and Toland looked up, noticing only then they had bent their heads and shoulders and backs toward one another.

Blue haze flowed in front of them. Enormous distant planets circled, dimmed to gray in the mist. No: one enormous, distant planet, with others drifting around it like beads on a necklace.

“We did it,” Eris breathed.

Toland spoke a second later, reverent. The world was still broken. It should have taken them much longer to travel through space than it had. They still lived in a simulation, charging the Witch-Queen with energy. But the awe in Toland’s voice helped soothe the sinking feeling in Eris’ core.

“Fundament,” he said. 

The world outside the windows was all blue: pale robin’s egg fog, ocean water atmosphere, mons like darting fish. Eris swooned against the back of the seat, suddenly exhausted. And why not? She had made the Osmium princesses anew. She had not known for certain that they wouldn’t disappear when she destroyed (activated?) the crystals. And now she had done this, too, her plans helping shape the universe into Fundament. There had been no need for Toland to input directions: in a false world, intent was their only compass. So it was intent that made her tired. Her shoulders felt heavy. Her head bobbed toward the back of the seat, toward the back of Toland’s head.

He turned as far as he could and reached for her. It did not incite either fear or pleasure; perhaps she was too deep in her exhaustion for either of them. He stoped short of touching her. He could have, even at an awkward angle, but knew that she would not want it. He said something in the Hive’s guttural language, surprised and seemingly without thinking about what language he spoke before exclaiming it.

“I will survive,” she said, slowly looking up from her focused stare at her own arm on the seat. “Thank you. What is that word you said, just now?”

Toland leaned away, looking ashamed. “It’s … a term of endearment, but of course, for the Hive that means a twisted kind of loyalty too, and some hatred.”

“I will accept the affection,” Eris said. “Not the rest. You called me dearest, once. Let us be human in that.”

“I will.” He met her eyes.

She sat looking at him for a moment, remembering how she had felt the same comfort when they had looked at one another with human eyes. Then the exhaustion weighed on her again. “I need to sleep,” she said softly. “Do not descend to the planet until I wake.”

“Oh,” he said. “Before you go, there is one part of this plan that didn’t factor into our cups-and-string calculations. You’re looking at Fundament at scale. But the planet is huge, and we must move at sublight speed this far into its gravity well. It looks like we have arrived … but the journey to the Osmium court will take almost a week.”

Questions flooded her, but she bit them back. All she could manage around the crowding of them was a nod. She turned and stumbled for her bunk, which waited where it had always been, slung in an alcove off the hall. She did not wrap herself in in case of loss of gravity, or pay attention to the single blanket, like a Guardian’s basic gear, folded on the bunk. As soon as she lay down on her back, she slept.

* * *

Osiris called this the prime timeline, or the present. He had not explained whether it was the least mutable of all his alternate timelines or whether it was simply the one in which he happened to have been born in _this_ incarnation. Was it the most important one? The most worth saving? Did humanity live in others?

Kass tried not to delve so deeply into these thoughts that she could not come out again.

Fire plashed against the bowl in front of her. She had been standing there for a long time, now rubbing her fingers against the edges of her red cloak, now running her hands through her short, blonde hair, now trying to read snatches from a book before being drawn back to the project in front of her. Her Ghost hovered beside her, occasionally making suggestions both serious and humorous about the project. She did not like that she couldn’t see the Traveler from Mercury.

Occasionally, the earth quaked as the Hive rained troops and green gouts of plasma down on other parts of the planet. Similar attacks were happening on Earth, too: so many that the Last City was threatened enough to create mutters of a renewed war, a new Mare Imbrium. During the forging her Ghost had piped in comms from Earth, Guardians shouting: “Why here? What do they want?”

There were so many reasons to be impatient, and she discarded all of them. She had to wait for the process to finish. No more urging it forward, even though she so terribly wanted it to be finished.

If she did this, she could return her friend Eris from wherever she had been taken. If she did not, the Witch-Queen’s victory over Eris would open humanity up to terrors only before glimpsed in the shadow of Oryx.

Kass, the Warlock who slew Oryx and Ghaul and others besides, stood beside a forge (it was not a forge) watching a sword in the fire (it was not a sword).

She and Ikora and Osiris and Banshee-44 and Ada-1 had all contributed to the design of this forge (it was not a forge), which sat squatly on Mercury beside Vance’s Lighthouse. Osiris, from whom the original idea had come, had not sopped in his wanderings through the Infinite Forest to see the project to completion, but Kass did not think this would break the project. It was not a time machine.

There are so many things it is not.

Kass looked up as Ikora swept onto the tiled floor.

“Eris has been gone too long,” Ikora said.

“It’s almost finished.” Kass put on a heavy glove she had placed beside the forge (it was not a forge). 

“Good. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.” Ikora’s tone was warm. The ground shook. “When you told me she had disappeared, I feared the worst. To pursue Savathûn … but we will strike before she can.”

Kass did not want to contradict her Vanguard, but found it difficult to hold in her thoughts. “Or, it’s possible the Witch-Queen has distorted time just enough so that we would notice. Couldn’t she have made Eris’ disappearance take no time at all if she wanted? Maybe she wants us to know. Maybe she wants us to do this.” She plunged the sword (it was not a sword) into the water.

“Kass,” Ikora said. “We cannot chase these ideas to every end or we will never move forward.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.” Kass smiled.

She withdrew the thing she and her Ghost and her teachers had forged.

Five feet of nacreous silver terminated in a pitch-black hilt and pommel. It was not a sword. Its shape was theoretical, its boundaries permeable, its image formed somewhere between the optic nerve and the neurons. Guardians saw it as a sword. Perhaps, Kass thought, Eris would see it as a spell.

Rocks broken off the Lighthouse scattered across Mercury as the bombardment came closer.

It was the blade that would part Savathûn from Imbaru … as long as Kass could live long enough to find her.


	11. Chapter 11

Life teemed around the Fundament. Toland sat in the pilot’s seat, keenly aware of the bubble of breathable air around him. Just behind him, the central hall where Eris’ bunk hung strapped to the walls ran with shadows. The Hive children chased one another through the cargo bay, into the hall, into the galley, and back, forbidden only from the engine rooms. Some of the shadows came from the ship’s dim illumination, a comfort to Toland’s eyes. Others came from the creatures that hung above them, curious about the ship’s wake.

Something like a meters-long centipede, segmented and frilled with legs, passed over the ship as a shadow. Spots of silver flocked like birds, splitting and reforming without the randomness of errata tossed by the system’s strange gravity. Their millions of cilia made it easy to differentiate them from the floating asteroids, the tiny chunks of rock, and the leviathan hulks of planets captured into the gas giant’s orbit. Fundament’s distant, far-flung atmosphere was pale blue, stirred into rainbows by the other planets that orbited around it.

So beautiful.

Earth’s deep oceans looked like this, maybe. If. Hive were once krill they were the krill that lived at the darkest depths, and snatched the bait-stars from the creatures that opened toothy mouths onto them.

He breathed deeply, comfortable surrounded by the alien life forms. The ship was on autopilot, zipping toward the outermost edges of the system. Creatures that looked close were often truly very far away, diving in and out of the mixing atmospheres of the close, strange planets in the Fundament system. Eris’s ship still trawled through the outer edges of Fundament’s influence.

Footsteps and jostling made him turn around. The three transformed thrall ran by together in a clump, then disappeared behind a bulkhead and dashed toward the back of the ship. Someone—Xi Ro, by her horns—bashed into the wall and kept running with no apparent need for recovery. Their play was surprisingly innocent for the people he knew they could become. It was not human, though. It was strangely silent, and the rustle of their spines could not be mistaken for the thump of human limbs.

Toland sniffed and turned back toward the dashboard.

So strange, to have as cargo his foe’s own younger self. He had never paid much attention to children. The life of a Guardian afforded little opportunity to see them if one rarely left the Tower. He had little idea how to treat them and little intent beyond surviving the trip. But it would be a pity if one of them was hurt, and it wouldn’t match any history of the Osmium children he knew, so …

Perhaps he could slip on a late, not-unpleasant persona. He did have _some_ sense of humor, so that should do it … perhaps …

It was with a sense of wounded dignity that he approached the three Hive princesses where they ran back and forth near the airlock. Despite the earlier association, there was little of the thrall they had once been about them. Pert, blue-gray faces had soft features and three familiar green eyes apiece. Where his chitin was stony and flaking, theirs looked soft, like the membrane beneath an eggshell.

“Greeting, princesses,” Toland intoned.

Nine eyes looked up.

“I am your emissary, here to tell you the rules of the court.” He folded his arms.

Three heads tipped into skeptical sidelong glances.

He spread his hands. “Xi Ro, oh, you strong storm front. Calm your thunder.”

“You aren’t in charge of us,” Xi Ro said, hesitantly, as if testing the words out.

“I am not.” Toland leaned against the nearby bulkhead. “I can’t make you do it. But you are princesses. You are going to be ambassadors, from the Hive of the Dreadnaught to the Krill of the Fundament. This is a great task. You can do it, or … you can remain ignorant.”

Sathona crawled from behind another bulkhead. “What are ambassadors?”

“Ambassadors talk to other countries. They make sure everyone abides by the rules. They work out how the rules might be used to make the situation fair to everyone.”

The kids were losing interest. Heavy heads tipped this way and that. Aurash pawed at Sathona’s tendrils. How strange, to look at them and see the looming shadows of Oryx and Savathûn.

“Okay,” said Sathona. “We’re the emissaries of the Dark Reach.”

“Is that what you call the hall back here, by the airlock?”

The siblings looked at one another, silently conferring on whether this sentence made sense to them, or whether it could be slotted into their mission of mapping out and naming the parts of the ship. Xi Ro hesitated before answering. “Yes.”

“Then let us go present the Dark Reach to Eris.”

“Okay,” said Sathona solemnly.

The three Hive siblings marched behind Toland in an uneven line as he crossed the few paces between the cockpit and Eris’ work room. Eris had left the door open. Toland palmed the activation and heard the door open with a hiss, already anticipating what Eris’ expression would look like when he presented her with what he was about to say. Her expressions offered such a warm melange of Hive and human. If she smiled human-fashion, the small lines forming at the corner of her lips, and smiled Hive-fashion, her eyes brightening … he would have achieved all he wanted without having to speak another word.

Eris was practicing with her spear.

The same bone-tipped spear she had picked up in the Dreadnaught had been decorated with black bands of cloth and small sigils written on squared-off stones. 

“A greeting from the court!” Toland said. He considered trying to act, then discarded it. He had spent most of his life enhancing and perfecting his natural affect’s sense of aloof pomposity, so there wasn’t much he needed to change. This made him feel both relief and a dim regret. But if Eris had never been able to stand his tone, she would never have invited him along to fight the Witch-Queen in the first place.

Air swished around the spear as Eris’ exercise came to a sudden stop. That slap could have taken the head off a Knight. She took all of them in with one even glance. Her hands curled like claws around the cursed or blessed spear. “Yes?”

Toland shuffled further into the room. The three thrall children moved around him like a single being, all limbs and tendrils. “The princesses of the Osmium court have established themselves in the hallway. As their emissary, I present them to you. Theirs is a new kingdom, but with significant benefits.”

The pageantry seemed to amuse Eris. “Very well, emissary,” she said, one corner of her mouth curling. She straightened up and tucked the spear neatly under her arm so that the end was just visible above her covered head. “What are their terms?”

Toland had not considered this. He looked down at the milling children. “What do you want from her?”

They conferred among themselves, whispering and shuffling. Finally, one of them, Aurash perhaps, stepped forward. “We want the hallway, by the airlock.”

“That is not negotiable,” said Eris. Toland could not tell whether she was trying to be mock-serious or not. Regardless, she sounded stony and unflappable, and not angry.

“You can have half of the hallway, east of my bed,” Eris said.

 _East!_ What a brilliant choice. Reinforce the children’s view of the ship as a landscape the size of a city, the size of a planet. Eris knew how they wanted to play.

Aurash considered. She glanced back at her sisters for confirmation. “The east side, and …” The krill faltered.

“Access to the workshop, perhaps,” Toland said. “A whole new country to trade with, with plenty of resources.”

“It’s good to have an allied country,” said Sathona loudly and imperiously. She covered herself in the role like a fine cloak, but was also so clearly a small child at play being a princess. Toland stifled his laughter against his arm.  
“Convey our wishes while we play,” Sathona continued, and suddenly the brood was a many-armed thing on the move, so fast it might have been winged. The black scales and blue tendrils of the children disappeared behind the bulkhead. Toland’s laughter could no longer be contained.

There was that smile, Hive-style, he had wanted from Eris. A smile with those eyes was also an ultimatum. He resisted the urge to bow to it.

The krill clattered into the distance. They would be safe. They could not open the airlock doors. His insurance against the Witch-Queen would remain in place.

Eris leaned against her spear, still smiling with only her eyes. “You return to the emissary role so readily. It suits you.”

“Truthfully, I still feel that particular alternate reality very strongly. Partially because I was so suited to it.” Toland was glad they had already managed to have part of a conversation about exactly how suited to it he was. He and Eris clearly both found the Hive and its ideas of devotion and obligation romantic, event as they could set the fantasy aside to fight Savathûn. 

“Neither of us are who we were before her influence touched us,” Eris said softly. “I must destroy her. That work is everything. And I am glad to have you here, planning this with me. Perhaps making you her emissary instilled in you some humility.”

“How could you accuse me of such a thing!” He faux-protested and moved further into the room. Instead of approaching Eris he made a circle around her to pretend to examine the flakes of stone left on the workbench. Most of Eris’ supplies were stacked neatly on the side of the workbench, but here and there she had left scraps of string or gem cutters. Conveniently placed as they were, they seemed to have been left because she was not finished ensorcelling the spear. “But, in truth, being in that Tower made me think about what a different person I would be without Eriana’s help, and yours. You changed me, and if I changed you it was not for the better.”

“That Tower made me think of Eriana also. For another glimpse of her alive, I would …” Eris shook her head. She set the spear down on the workbench. The bladed end of it still separated her from Toland. He suspected she was as vividly aware of the distance as he was. “Well, I would not succumb to Savathûn’s fantasies. Never. I am sick to death of tricks! Finally, let us bring one to her.”

The smile had left her eyes. Now she radiated anger, which he met with silent determination. This seemed to be — such a relief — the right reaction. She tapped her fingers on the table, then began to trail them toward the sharp corner of the workbench. Toland struggled to respond, frozen to the spot while words flung themselves around his head in passionate and sloppy poetry.

Sathona ran into the room on all fours, her bioluminescent tendrils flaring along her back. Eris and Toland both turned to look at the same time. The kids did not speak. Instead the others filed in, whirled around one another, and retreated out again, like a hurricane or a scouting party.

Toland stifled a laugh. “My court can be quite energetic.”

Eris’ anger distilled into a focused amusement he found unstoppably compelling. It was difficult not to take her hand. He could see himself moving almost as clearly as if it were happening.

“Well, emissary,” Eris said. “Now that the boundary lines are drawn, we come to this question of resources. I am willing to trade my cut stones for … ration bars, at a rate of one for one.”

Both of them smiled small and hesitant and tight, without showing teeth.

“Two for one.” Toland tapped the table next to the spear for emphasis.

“One-and-one-half.” She pressed the tip of her gloved finger into the back of his bare hand.

The corner of the table still formed a barrier between them. He turned his hand over. Of course he would feel the same sense of surrender he had in the haunted ship here. He was forever bowing to the things he loved.

She met his eyes. When he didn’t move, she unhooked her gauntlet. It fell heavily to the table. Her glove, tucked under her quilted shirt, extended back almost to her elbow and fell heavy with armor plates. Her fingers were short and pale, the back of her hand mottled with rippled scars. A stillness settled over the world. She set her palm against his, her skin very warm.

The angle was wrong for them to lace their fingers together. Again he could so easily envision it. Now, too, he felt that she would feel the same way. He shifted ever so slightly, moving his weight onto one foot and turning his hand, to move around the corner of the table.

Skin against skin was like sandpaper. The room swirled around him. Dizzy, he gripped the table with both hands, breaking contact with Eris and unable to see her reaction as he lowered his forehead almost to the surface of the table to try to stop the spinning. He gasped, only then realizing how dry his mouth had become. He missed being a ghost, he thought bitterly.

“What has become of you?” Eris intoned, cocking her head to try to look at his face under the fall of his hair. She had not moved her hand.

Flashes of black-and-white caverns filled with smoke. “When I was in the Sea of Screams … I had no body. To have sensation now is overwhelming. Intriguing, too, and pleasant, but … difficult.”

He closed his eyes against the spinning, and heard Eris shuffling. The dizziness gradually died down as she spoke.

“How surprising, that after I thought I was the one who shied away from touch, it would prove to slay you too. Take your time, Shattered One.” He could hear the smile in her voice, still strong even though she had also sounded genuinely worried. “It is quite a reversal.”

“Can I take your chair?” Toland managed.

“Yes.”

He sat down. The dizziness had subsided, so he could look over the spear and the workbench to where she stood with her arms folded, a sliver of wrist the only evidence of her bared hand.

“You feel the way I did,” Eris said. “Except I have grown used to it.”

He gave a harsh laugh. She had not known what it was like to be dissolved under the Deathsinger’s fire, and he was glad of that. She would have seen it as a death. Even for a Guardian, it was one particularly horrible to experience. Even if he had reveled in it, he knew it was not the fate for her. On the heels of this comparison chased an immense relief. She was saying she knew how he felt. She was one of the few who could. And … thoughts swirled. He had to work to choose which one to say, even as they all felt essential. Being undone by a touch did not change his belief in his own words.

“You must think it strange that I have trouble giving in to my desires.” He looked up for her response. Her gaze remained level, but her Hive eyes brightened in a universe-eating smile.

“You do seem to give into them constantly. Joining the Hive, pulling the Guardians this way and that …”  
“That is why it is so confusing not to be able to embrace this one. I did not think I was lonely. Perhaps …”

“That emotion I also know.” Eris picked up one of her golden signet tokens in her gloved left hand. “Be for me an emissary, not from the Hive, but from yourself. The speaker for the Shattered comes to me with a bowed head and bare hands. I _want_ this.” Her voice deepened. “But I do not know how to want or to give in. You know both.”

“I think you do know them. If you truly do not, tell me to leave you be. We have been drawn to each other here, and on the Dreadnaught.” He was indeed bowing his head, but not out of subservience or play-acting. He felt suddenly tired, both exhausted and excited, as he had been the day before the descent into the Pit. He had expected all of the rest of them to come out alive, that day.

“Yes.” Eris gathered more golden charms and stacked them between the head of her spear and a clamp surrounded by a halo of metallic dust. “I do. But as emissaries, we must approach this—this union—as—as equal standing. Are we allies only because we are neighboring countries? You and I have walked many strange places together, Toland.” Again her voice deepened, then broke and returned softer. “How much of this desire is for those places? I would have us choose each other, not choose a new way to continue the fight between our opposing armies.” She pushed the pile of charms toward him.

He took the top one to begin the negotiation, and to enjoy the feeling of her sigil beneath his fingers. “Would we have been drawn to one another in the City, as much as in the Dreadnaught?”

“We were. The two grim ones, surrounded by so many friends I loved … and you one of them, a friend first,” Eris said. “As a friend and as a teacher.”

He was unsure of what the sigils were supposed to stand for in this negotiation, but took the top one from the pile anyway. He pushed two across the table. “Release yourself from my teaching. Which of us lived among the Hive for years? I spectated upon them, and played the byways of the Witch-Queen. The limits of the Guardians, the walls even around immortality, crumbled for me. I cannot be responsible for the Guardians’ curiosity or their limited view of the world inside the ascendant plane. But you do not collapse at the suggestion of weakness in the body. You know the world. Teach me that.” He met her eyes, challenging. Her expression changed to a joyful ferocity that shocked through him.

Now this was a duel, but one in which they both gloried. A kind of momentum that could so easily change into attraction. He thrilled to the idea of the spear, now making a rough barrier between them, pointed at his throat.

Eris immediately slapped one of the two sigils back onto the table in front of him. “If we are not student and teacher, are not two captors and two ransoms, then there is nothing you can admit that will compel me to teach you. We are two travelers. Nothing less, although maybe so much more.”

“Or the other way around.” Toland felt he understood her completely, even though he could not have defended the words in front of an array of Warlocks. He snatched the sigil up. “The Hive always insisted on ranks. Emissaries, kings. The Guardians have them too, but … not in a way so glass-sharp and claw-sharp. Not in a way that encourages knives in the back.”

“At last, you understand,” said Eris. Her knowing tone sent shivers through him. He suspected she felt the same. “In order to see it you have to understand, and now that you have seen you can choose … Have you chosen me, after all?”

“I have,” Toland said. The words were not quite a whisper, like the rub of sandpaper. 

“I need to think,” Eris said. She stood up. The spear scraped against the table as she lifted it. “You need to recover. But when you do … You never did tell me about the beauty of the Moon, like we talked about in that last Tower.”

A clattering from the hallway told him the kids had probably gotten into something. Eris used this as motivation to head for the door.

“I will,” Toland said.

Eris paused by the doorway. “Rarely have I heard you so lost for words. I do not believe I like it.”

She left, leaving him looking down at his own crossed arms on the table, shocked and triumphant.


	12. Interlude 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How are we all feeling in these strange times? Still working? Suddenly have a lot of free time? Uncertain? My state has issued a stay-at-home order for people not involved in essential businesses. This fic has, for better and worse, become concreted in memory as something I did that month the virus shut down the country. We have lived in interesting times for a long time. Escapism helps me; I hope it also helps you. This and the next one will be short, sweet chapters, and then we’ll get back to the larger plot.

Eris and Toland traveled toward Fundament in comfortable silence for most of the day. In the evening Eris counted her wormspore stores, and, finding them lacking, wondered whether she even needed to eat in this constructed world. Familiar green spores rained over the countertop.

Standing in the small galley, she flipped through the stems and heads like turning the pages of a book. Outside, the silver-blue clouds would be growing thicker. Fundament made the vacuum of space into something like a sea, deep, diffuse atmospheres interacting with one another like tides. They were really sailing through Savathûn’s memories now. Eris could only trust that her own plot had worked, or that the Fundament would not be too dangerous for humans to survive. Had all of the creatures in this solar system existed in the real world? She had to test she had not re-written anything that would foil her own plan.

She missed the Guardian. Kass and Eris had always been able to pull one another out of tough spots before.

A noise from behind startled her enough that she jumped, smacking her shoulder against a bulkhead.

One of the thrall stood there, her tiny hands tapping together. “Eris?”

Eris turned. She recognized Aurash from the green cast to her blue spines. She was smaller than her siblings, and even alone she looked skeletal. Typical of a thrall, but the others had fleshed out more, muscle or fat beneath their blue-black skin. Only their teeth, revealed even when her mouth was closed by lips too thin to look human, looked identical to her sisters’.

“If you are hungry, I will prepare these,” Eris said.

“Yes,” Aurash said. “Who eats first?”

“I don’t understand.”

Aurash swarmed up the leg of the table and sat on it. Eris resisted the urge to wave her away.

“You’re the first. You hold the food. We eat as we deserve, but who’s second?”

“No!” Eris stood. “We do not eat as we deserve. Everyone eats. There is little to go around, but we eat as we want. We ration.”

“No one’s first?”

“Who told you this? Did you decide among yourselves?”

Aurash tipped her head, confused. Behind her, the two other sisters crept into the room. They looked at one another as if communicating without words.

“We all eat at once,” Eris said.

She handed them the wormspore. They did not protest. She would have expected the Hive she knew to do so, to demand hierarchy. These, she reminded herself, were the sisters as they had been before the worms, or something like them. They had loved each other, comforted each other, before the Deep turned their love into killing. She stood quietly as they ate, then gave them a ball of twine to play with, picked up two more shoots of wormspore, and shooed all of them out into the main hall.

How reassuring, that the Osmium princesses might be taught to stay as kind as they had once been. Would living in the court of a mad king have made them cutthroat even if the worms hadn’t wound their ways up from the Deep? If the Syzygy, the apocalyptic tsunami, had not been gradually building up pressure under the ground? Would even Savathûn have been kind, or could callousness come from the kindest of communities? Eris did not have answers.

Aurash tugged at her elbow. “Where are we going?”

“To the Osmium king’s court,” Eris said. “The court of your father. Where we will discover the plans of the Witch-Queen, and conquer her.”

“Ooh.” Aurash sounded fascinated. “Can we help you?”

“Yes. You help by being here.” Eris had little to lose from telling them, even if they asked for details. If they were anything like children she knew, they would be eager for adventure. Even, or especially, if that adventure was dangerous.

Eris watched Sathona and Xi Ro tossing the ball back and forth, still solemn even in their play. Some human children were like this too, she knew. It was not their species that made them solemn, but their careful attention to the world.

Aurash tumbled back to her siblings, interrupting their play to tell them the news. One threw the ball, which she caught in her sharp, soft, claws and tossed immediately back, spinning stories about a queen. Sathona participated as easily as the rest.

Even if she knew the answer, Eris found herself lost in thought of how they had turned to such evil after a beginning like this.

Toland swung around from where he sat in the pilot’s seat. “ _I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost._ ”

Eris approached him, the voices of the children dimming behind her as they moved further into the back of the ship. “Do you recall these words, or did you arrange them yourself?”

“Dante arranged them, for his allegory of the underworld.”

Eris leaned her elbows on the back of the chair, letting her hands hang down beside Toland’s thin shoulder. She handed him the two sprigs of wormspore. The glowing green heads looked strange against the colorful atmospheres outside the glass.

The conversation the day before had changed how Eris thought of her relationship with Toland, although she was still wary of peeling off all the layers of it. It was with great relief that she saw him reach for her, and clasped bare hand to glove. He held the wormspore over his shoulder and she bit the top off it, then watched while he ate his the same. He played with the stems for a minute before dropping them in his lap and turning fully around to reach for her again. They pressed palms to palms and laced their fingers together. She leaned forward to press her forehead against his. The sun was always at their back, suffusing the forward view with light but leaving the ship in dimness, so that he was a suggestion of heat and very bright eyes.

It had been such a very long time that she had wanted to unreservedly touch him that to do so now felt unreal. The dimness made them into curled hands in the dark, comfortable claws. She could hear him breathing and the shift of his body against the chair. The intimacy itself was not new: she had felt the same kind of intimacy when they floated in orange fluid, or when they met on the Ascendant Plane, her a living corpse and him a floating tuft of lightning. So she was not hesitant about the intimacy, although the _physicality_ was still strange. They would need to _discuss_ their scars, their mutations, the strangeness of his embodiedness.

She was further along that path than before, though. She pressed against him and felt his breath on her face.

“There is nothing else I could want, but to be with you on this journey,” he said.

“Nothing?”

His mouth twisted. “Perhaps some other ambitions remain …”

“Leave them for later. But I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

He pushed back against her, skin-to-skin of their faces, their third eyes closed.

“The children will help us,” Eris muttered. “We will succeed.”

“I believe in this conditional loyalty.”

“And I believe you do.”

They rested there while the blue wisps of atmosphere shredded on the prow of the ship, moving ever closer to Fundament.


	13. Interlude 2

Blue, organic starships, each one trailing a bouquet of tendrils, floated through the Fundament system. Still comfortably leaning on the back of the pilot’s chair, Eris watched them with a sense of quietude she had not felt in years. No voices assailed her. Not Savathûn’s, not the Hellmouth’s, not her own fears and worries and determination. She did not have to work to believe she was on the right path, both physically and mentally. She did not dwell on the dim discomfort of her eyes and chitin or the beat of her heart. Things would be—were—all right.

Toland shifted, clearly uncomfortable facing sideways in the pilot’s seat, and pressed a thumb against her temple. “I wanted you in the Sea of Screams.”

“I had wanted to kiss you for so long.” Eris forced words around the heaviness in her throat. “But we need to talk.”

“About bodies.” His thumb circled on the cloth. “About the strangeness of having them.”

Somewhere behind them, the krill kids clattered.

“Yes.” Eris leaned into the touch. “Brought up in a world of immortals, I cannot help but think of us both as already dead.”

“Then lean into that. Be the vault of cathedrals where we go to cross the barriers. Be the corpse fire from the wormspore. You know what we both value.” His voice hissed. “ _Take it._ ”

Take life and death and him, all at once. She wanted to.

“I have conditions,” Eris managed. “Negotiation for the emissary. I know you want me as Hive _and_ as human. I will not have you seeing Ir Yût when you look at me. I will have three kisses.

“Each time will be a test. Once, now, when I am human, to prove you want me human; once, another day, when I am like the Hive, to prove you want me scarred and alien; and a third time in the way that suits us best, the way that is not desire but long loyalty.”

He gave a small nod, just enough that she could feel the movement against her face. They kissed like passing a secret, furtive and brief. They had known each other for such a long time but to learn this was different. They laced their hands together, adding the sensation to the kiss. But Eris knew he wouldn’t touch her forehead. How they both felt about that would have to be negotiated later.

For now, it was as if they made up for lost time. They varied between watching the life swimming through space outside or watching and kissing each other, sinking into a closeness that had been too long unspoken. 

Several things shook them out of the reverie at the same time. In the workshop came a clatter, like metal hitting the floor. The console chimed, its gradual countdown to orbital insertionfinally reaching the stage where it needed hands on controls.

Toland fixed a solemn gaze on the planet ahead. Fundament could now be seen as a blue-black, cloudy gas giant at the center of the tangled orbits. “Soon, our ears will ring with the song of Aurash’s court. It does not yet know what it is.”  
Eris straightened up, wanting to stretch. Rising away from Toland was like moving from warm water to cold, jarring and impossible to ignore. “Where are the children?”

“They were eating—“

Something crashed to the floor in the next room.

Eris dashed to the workshop.

The conjured krill princesses were growing. As if in a dream, they had shifted to lankier, larger forms between one day and the next. No longer children, they were now teenagers or knights, still thinner than the knight morphs of the Hive.

All three stood around the table. Sathona raised herself into an imperious posture, her spines quivering. Her eyes shifted from kitten-blue to Hive-green. She hissed at Aurash, while Xi Ro stalked around them as if deciding whether to try to calm them or plan to win the coming fight.

“Give it back.” Sathona spat each word.

Aurash clutched a sprig of wormspore to herself.

“What is happening?” Eris stopped in the doorway.

Aurash showed her teeth. “If she drops it and I pick it up, it’s mine.”

“We each got _two.”_ Xi Ro spoke through clenched teeth. Since it was easier for her krill-thrall form to do that than it would have been for a human, the effect was less of a growl and more of a whisper.

Eris’ mission demanded she model calmness to them. They needed to be close to the Witch-Queen’s memories, but she couldn’t stomach pushing them toward the Hive they would become. She needed to be Taox to them, a storyteller who would give them pictures of the world. “Do not steal from your siblings. Two each.”

If they had been Guardians, she would have been more tempted to tell them the dire possible consequences of their actions. It did not seem as advisable with children.

Aurash threw the wormspore onto the ground at Sathona’s feet. To Eris her movements were somewhere between child and teen, or both at different times. As the ship approached Fundament the siblings grew unevenly through time.

Sathona picked the wormspore up. “Thank you.” Without prompting, she chose the slightly lofty tone they had all been using when pretending to be part of the “emissary” fantasy.

“We have almost reached our destination. Your home.”

“Our home?” Xi Ro paused in her circling. Sathona took the opportunity to eat the head of the wormspore whole.

“Yes. Let me finish the story I began for you.”

Without prompting, Sathona flung herself against Eris’ side and sat with her, tucking her head under Eris’ arm. Eris froze, one hand still lifting from the floor. The three green eyes looking up into hers were full of threat; she would be swarmed by thrall like Vell was. She felt her skin break, painless but punctured.

She took a breath of the cold, metallic-scented air.

The terror faded. Scent and sound reminded of her where she was. The ship hummed around her. A small click might be from Toland taking manual control of the ship, pulling from Guardian memories long ago and the more recent lessons she had given him. The thrall muttered among themselves, ignorant of Eris’ momentary panic.

She sat down. The thrall curled around her. While the ship glided toward Fundament, she told them about the Sky and the Deep, hoping it would give them some guidance in the days to come.


	14. Chapter 12

The Osmium Court’s country sat low in the high tide. After Toland docked and Eris set the locks that would keep the ship unassailed and above the waves, they were ceaselessly in sight of the dark, briny water. Inter-system craft, submersibles, and electric-engined boats rocked together at the marina on the southern shoreline.

The native continent of the krill, one of the many floating islands teeming with Fundament’s fecund mix-and-match species, was ruled from the forward palace. Eris disembarked onto the wet dock, krill children at her heels, and looked up at the palace with a firmly set, determined expression. What she dimly remembered from the Books of Sorrow now surrounded her in a fortress of pale blue towers, black lightning rods, and silver awnings and umbrellas. She leaned on her spear, the golden charm tokens clicking quietly against one another. Both the metal point and the primed spells could pin enemies down.

Krill people, varied from as skeleton-thin as the Hive to plump with blue and purple bioluminescent flesh, walked and murmured along the pedestrian path beside the marina or labored in and out of ships. Almost all carried umbrellas or wore wide, metallic-white hats. Third eyes and the nails on four-fingered hands caught the light. Among the adults scampered children and many-legged animals Eris assumed to be pets. Shops along the sidewalk sold fish, boating supplies, or anemoneic fronds that could have been either decorative flowers or food.

“We should have hats,” Sathona said gently.

Teenage Aurash had developed prickly dignity. She watched the passers-by with her arms crossed, sniffing as if the rotten, salty dockside air offended her. “She’s right. The rain can eat through your skin if you’re caught out in a storm.”

_This entire world is deadly to us._

That particular quote from the Hive records had given Eris insight. Not insight into what the Hive were as a horde, since it no longer applied to their deadly expansion, but into what they had once been. The krill had to live as a defense-oriented people. Not literally herbivores, but low on the gas giant’s political food chain.

The Osmium King’s palace had been built cantilevered out over the sea, like the captain’s suite on a human sailing ship. Eris identified it from the length of its dark blue walls, the long rows of evenly set dark oval windows. She did not recognize the sigil coral growths had been coaxed into at the two visible corners of the structure. It was too old for her to know, too well-known to the krill princesses for them to have included it in the annals of their rise and fall. Savathûn had known it, though, and so Eris’ spell to repeat the Witch Queen’s memories revealed it to her.

“There.” Xi Ro began to walk toward the path that would lead her to the palace. “We have to go home.”

So, she was beginning to remember. Eris met Toland’s eyes and matched his small, tentatively triumphant smile. The plan was working. The princesses would slot back into the story like bullets into a gun, draining Savathûn’s ability to pull whatever arcane energy she had intended to harvest from her human captives.

All three sisters began to move away from the ship, entranced. Eris followed with the triumph slowly shading into sadness. Even after the short time she had known them, she would miss them when they soon grew up into explorers and scholars she hardly recognized. They would discover the Syzygy that would soon flood their world, and meet the forces which would corrupt them away from those good intentions.

They _had_ already done so.

Toland followed the children. As he passed, he leaned down to speak quietly to Eris. “So we go not down into the Pit but up into the court. Will we sing the same verse over again, or—”

His voice was cut off mid-sentence. Eris knew he had kept speaking, but she could no longer hear the sound. All of her senses skipped, the smells and sounds of the docks flipping off and on and off again.

She saw Io.

The vision was distorted. At the edges of her vision seethed the easily recognizable black-and-silver of a Taken orb. Ah. Savathûn used spells like this as transmitters, shouting proof of herself out to whoever would listen, strengthening Imbaru through rumor and intrigue.

A Guardian leaned over the orb, her cloak flapping in the wind. Eris didn’t recognize the armor, but, when she spoke, the voice of Oryx’s killer was instantly familiar. Kass’ voice was hoarse, deeper than Eris remembered it. She had been talking to the Vanguard or to her fireteam for a long time on a mission that made coordination mandatory.

“Er…Eris. Can you hea…?”

“I am here, Guardian.” Relief swept through her.

Gunfire rattled behind Kass. “Savathûn’s transmissions are a two-way street! If I can get a fix on where you are, I can…” Taken energy crackled, obscuring whether she had stopped talking or the words had been eaten up in the space between the two worlds. “I’m sending three swords/needles.”

“Say that word again.” Eris cocked her head, trying to determine whether another voice had cut in over Kass’.

“Swords/needles.” No—something in whatever power she was working made the words the same. Two voices, both Kass, speaking two different definitions. “Find three. They’ll destroy her lies.”

Immediately, Eris worried: _will they destroy mine?_

“I’m sending one now but you’ll have to p-prime the others. Tether and then detonate. We’ll let you ou-out.” Kass’ voice faded away.

Eris took a deep breath. The briny smell of the ocean filled her mouth, and the krill city snapped back into place. She felt the hum of magic behind her and pressed on Toland’s back with one hand and Aurash’s head, the nearest kid, with the other. “Move forward!”

She barely had time to complete the word when a soundless explosion pushed cold, wet air against their backs and sent the princesses stumbling. Eris hunched and twisted, feeling a pressure like a high wind, to look over her raised shoulder.

Her ship had disappeared. A featureless blue cube stood in its space, head-sized pixels of that same blank blue floating up around it. Green spikes flickered in the air and then disappeared, leaving the blue hole in the world. All texture had been removed. Could she breathe the air inside the cube? She wasn’t certain.

It matched what Kass had said: the green swords/needles tethered and then blew away a chunk of reality. To do this too many times would bring Eris’ fabricated world to Savathûn’s attention, although Kass hadn’t known that. Eris took a deep breath. She was _good_ with ontological magic. She could trust her own interpretation of what had been shown to her. And now she could feel the location of three swords/needles stabbed into the world.

Eris would have to tether each of Kass’ intrusion points, but not detonate them until she primed all three. Then, either Kass or Eris could pull this world apart without detonating them, as long as Savathûn had already been drained enough by the repetition Eris had introduced into her stories.

Would it work? It followed the logic Eris had used to manipulate Savathûn’s game worlds so far.

None of the krill noticed. That part of the world had simply been removed from them, unable to be perceived.

Toland noticed. He did not say anything, but met her eyes. He could make silences feel like static, like waiting.

They were running out of time.

Eris pressed her gloved palm against Toland’s scarred cheek. “There is a needle stuck into the world in the palace. You must withdraw it like disarming a bomb. Be careful. Go to the palace. I will find the engines. Meet me near the court’s throne when this is done.”

He gripped the back of her head, first hesitant and then firm when she didn’t pull away. “Be careful, Eris. You have built a fine maze.”

Then his arch, pompous nature folded around him like wings. He gathered the princesses around him like a severe teacher, and took them in his wake toward the palace.

Eris introduced herself to the city.

From the Books of Sorrow she had gotten the impression Fundament was a precarious place, but had not considered how this might manifest in the day-to-day architecture. The floating city seemed constantly poised between drowning and electrocution. Blue-black puddles smelling of sea water waited everywhere for the unwary foot, their surfaces shining with chemicals. In the skyline the skeletal silhouettes of lightning engine towers interspersed the graceful, organic-looking four-and-five story buildings. Dreams and ambitions had gone into those towers.

Such a low city, with many puddles and soft shorelines, floated as the waves rushed in parallel with the continent’s gradual movement. The people mostly lived a life of low barriers and permeable rooms. Most houses included courtyards where families could receive guests outside. It brought new understanding to Eris’ studies of the Hive’s wide ritual atriums and tunnels broad enough for marching armies.

Although she didn’t have an exact sense of where the engines would be, common sense and the markers Kass had briefly been able to provide both lead Eris to the center aft, opposite the palace. It was not the far side of the continent; she would not have been able to walk that far, even though Fundament’s fractured, floating tectonic plates on their acidic ocean had broken into smaller continents than existed on Earth. When she reached a heavy industrial district, she knew she was getting close.

More of the towers in this area had no windows, and most were low. The ground rumbled. She found a door marked with a branching symbol. Without any knowledge of the language, she couldn’t be sure it lead to the right place. She might not even have been looking at the krill language, but rather nonsense words like a sign in a dream. But it looked different from the other doors, and the pavement rumbled here. That was likely to lead to the engines.

The door wouldn’t open.

Eris crept around the nearest corner to wait and think. Perhaps someone would know how to open it. In the meantime she hid her spear as best she could, couching it in a leather cord around her shoulders so that it hung rigid against her back. It wasn’t subtle, but was out of the way.

When someone did approach, they moved furtively too. Four-fingered hands darted out of a wide sleeve to pull a high, hooded hat, not unlike Eris’ own, down over an obscured face. Another unknown symbol had been stitched onto the front of the hat.

Clearly this person wasn’t simply arriving at work. They fumbled at the sigil and looked up and down the winding street. This gave Eris the courage to step out.

“Wait.” Eris hoped her three eyes and similar headdress would make her appearance relatively easy on the krill.

It seemed to work. She lowered her hood, revealing a round face on a thin neck. Narrow teeth flashed in a lipless mouth as she spoke. Part of the effect was disturbingly thrall-like, while the way she held herself and the shape of her soft horns reminded Eris of the tattered, regal bearing of a Hive wizard. Perhaps this person should be addressed as a sterile mother, similar to Taox, the traitor who would have sold the Osmium Princesses to a rival court in a desperate attempt at peace.

Maybe Eris was looking at Taox. Was this krill even now on her way to betray the broken royal family? If the timeline Eris had created was right, it was too soon for that. Still, she suspected.

“Do not be frightened,” Eris said. “I am here for the same reason as you.”

The krill’s nervousness confirmed it. Enough Guardians had not bothered to hid their distaste for Eris’ mode of speech that she listened close for hints of derision. Instead, the krill lowered her voice, her hand still up near the unresponsive lock sigil.

“I’ve just come to check on the engine,” the krill said.

“I will go with you.” Eris was adamant. She hoped this would work. She had created this story, and needed to trust its hints.

The krill turned away and entered the code. Eris followed close. The krill hunched, but didn’t stop her.

The windowless towers covered a web of stairs and catwalks. Like the city outside, the colors tended toward blues and silvers, deepening to navy blue shadows at the bottom of the stairs. The humming outside rose to a distant roar. The engines themselves lurked in a suggestion of turning paddle wheels and lifting counterweights. As soon as the door shut behind them, leaving them dim light, the krill seemed to wonder why Eris was still there. Watery light fell from the skylights and strings of bioluminescent flora. She turned to her, hands clasped but her shoulders set in a determined stance.

Eris needed to get control of the situation. “Let me be honest. I come here searching for strange things. The fate of the palace may depend on it.”

“Strange how?” Her eyes did not narrow in suspicion; instead she looked guileless.

“A light that should not be lit. A door that should not be opened.”

Footsteps startled both of them. Three krill in heavy, waterproof clothes walked up the stairs one catwalk away, headed for the far side of the room.

“You aren’t an engineer.” The krill said quietly. Having successfully gotten inside, any fear that she had shown of being caught had fallen away.

“No.” Eris took a chance based on what she knew about Taox. “The precarious placement we are in relative to the Helium Drinkers’ court concerns me. But this is not just worry, not mere prophecy. I may be able to help you save people.”

The krill nodded. Eris felt an electrical tickle that had nothing to do with the rumble of the continental engines. This plan was likely to work because she and Toland had re-written the story to run this way. All that was left was to play it out. She felt events slotting in around her. The people here would be predisposed to be useful, if Eris didn’t contradict the original story too much.

So why did she still feel like she had gotten something wrong?

“Come with me.” The krill looked around the web of walkways and stairs again, but not with fear. Instead, she reminded Eris of a Guardian surveying a battlefield, knowing there was danger here that could not kill her.

She lead Eris down the stairs. Two levels down they came to the uppermost mechanical controls of the nearby engines. Instead of catwalks, here discrete rooms sat one after another. Eris caught glimpses inside as she passed and saw buttons and levers that reminded her of more organic versions of Old Russia’s Warsat emplacements. Fronds of coral grew against the walls and over the control panels. Farther down, a krill scraped barnacles off a wall. Buttons shone like an organic sheen like the nacre inside a clam shell. The smell of brine and ozone increased until it was like a spider web, brushing tangibly against Eris’ face.

The sound of churning machinery and the smell of the ocean increased as they moved downward. Eris couldn’t clearly see the shape of the engines, although she imagined them as massive and precise paddle wheels, able to propel the continent, change its course, or hold it steady.

At a closed, slate-gray door, the krill tapped on the sigil to unlock it with much more certainty than she had outside the engine access.

She swung the door open. This control board sat underneath a wide window. Just a few stories underground, they were already under the ocean. The walls of the engine levels—perhaps _decks_ was the more appropriate term, as the continent sliced through the ocean with a keel, like a ship — were blue-gray metal. Eris could see them curving away from her on either side, as if from a porthole. Water frothed outside, blue-black at the bottom and green-silver at the top.

The door shut behind her. She wondered whether the underside of the continent had been built this way to allow it to travel in this way, or whether somewhere around her was natural rock as well, which had served for some time as a natural keel. How had this all started? The krill had adapted to their fractured world with cleverness and determination from the very beginning, well before the Syzygy.

Just as Eris was beginning to look not for details about the history of the Hive, but for the telltale glow of Kass’ sword/needle point, the door opened again. Eris braced herself for it to be one of the other krill, who would soon voice their suspicions about how and why they had gotten inside a facility meant only for engineers.

“Ah,” said the krill who had accompanied Eris. “Good, you’re here. I need you to identify this person.”

Another krill with a similar body type stood in the doorway. “We have so little time.” The new person crossed the room fast, then pointed at a white froth of water that skirled through the ocean and disappeared. “The delegates are almost here.” She turned back to Eris. “I do not know you, but whether or not you want to be, you know enough now that you’re involved. Choose: join us or we leave you somewhere you won’t be found for a long time. We’re trying to save the kingdom, even if we have to change it first. Tell me your name, and I’ll tell you mine. But you’re in, after that. There are only two choices, after that.”

Eris would still need to find the control point. She would have to break away from this story of rebellion to find it, but also knew she was drawing power from the story staying as close to the original as it could be. Holding the balance would be so important. “My name is Eris Morn. The king is distracted and sleeping, and the delegates are coming with or without his say. I will join your cause.”

The newcomer blinked all three eyes in bemused surprise at Eris’ willingness. “Welcome,” she said sincerely. “My name is Taox.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recently learned about the [Osmium Traitor](https://www.destinypedia.com/Osmium_Traitor).


	15. Chapter 13

“Where did you come from?” Taox shut the door behind her. Watery light painted her blue-green skin brighter.

Eris wondered whether she could re-knit the world so the question had never been asked. Instead, she dodged. “From the sea, like all of us.”

“This is a very small investigation, Eris Morn,” said Taox. She folded her arms. Pale green lines on her engineer's jumpsuit looked like the wings of a moth, folded behind her. “Just a suspicion, borne of the strangeness of the court.”

“It has been strange longer than that.” The krill Eris had followed in spoke firmly before turning to look at the water as if waiting for a signal.

“Rioth, your eye for new recruits is the reason I do not report this _Eris_ right away. Tell me, do you see the darkness in her?”

Eris was startled at first, then remembered Sathona’s description of the Helium Court knights: “bright/evil.” White-hot as the lightning that so often struck the city, perhaps, the light all an association with pain and fire. Or a whisper from the worms who even now lay in the depths of Fundament’s misty ocean. It was easy to forget in the reconstruction that the ocean was not made of water. Fundament fizzled and spat with the energy of a planet that had never stopped boiling the soup of life. Or else the aliens called their equivalent word for krill remembered their origins in the sea, the comfort of a massing swirl of one another’s bodies. Darkness, here, meant safety and trust. 

“Yes.” Rioth vouched for Eris.

“Then perhaps the timing is very good.” Taox sighed. “The ambassadors from the Helium Drinkers are almost here.”

“We saw them.” Rioth glanced at the churning water.

“The engines will be slowed so they can more easily pull up alongside. No one stops me here; they know the new engines would be just disparate sparks in disparate minds if I hadn’t drawn up the plans for the whole array. In the meantime, I’ll be able to get a good look at the emissaries. Try to find out what they want before the palace even sees them. We must put a stop to this peacefully, if we can.”

Taox had been reluctant to betray the royal family, Eris remembered. Children were at stake. Children who, to her, were innocents. The Osmium princesses had already been threatened, as far as Taox knew, and were now only alive by virtue of not having been eaten for their royal blood just yet.

“And if we cannot …” Rioth’s gaze returned.

“Please, be patient.”

 _I cannot afford patience, and am not sure they can._ “I’m looking for something else,” Eris said. “A portal. Strange lights.”

“Yes. That’s familiar.” Taox steepled her fingers. “I’ll tell you where the portal is, if you do something for me.”

The weight of the spear weighed heavy on Eris’ shoulder. “What would you have me do?”

“The Osmium Court and the Helium Drinkers could maintain our uneasy alliance for decades if not for our king’s unpredictable madness. Whether because of his great age or something else … he has become consumed with strange passions. One of them is the white worm he keeps as his familiar. An alien thing, dead, but he treats it as if it is alive. Find your way into the palace and steal it from him. Remove its influence, and perhaps we will have peace.”

“I will. But show me the portal first. It is beneath our feet, while the palace is far away.”

“How can I trust you?”

Eris unslung the spear. She held her palm out. “Take this.” Slowly, she raised the weapon. “It is my own make, and protects against such magics as a familiar might conjure."

Taox looked at her for a long time. Her eyes, staring, did not waver from Eris’ face. Her lipless mouth thinned even further as she considered the offer.

Finally, she said, “Yes.”

Eris passed the spear to her. Taox looked down at the talismans tied to it as they gently chimed against one another. Over her shoulder, Eris saw Rioth watching Taox closely.

“Come with me.”

Eris followed Taox out of the control room. Taox immediately descended the nearby stairs, ducking underneath a fan of coral that had been allowed to grow unpruned at head height. Eris paused at the top of the stairs just long enough to see the back of Rioth’s head, silhouetted against the green water.

She jogged to catch up as Taox descended more stairs. “I am new to this place.”

“I thought as much,” Taox said.

Her firm, knowing tone reminded Eris pleasantly of Toland. Two inventors of very different systems … they would either get along like wildfire or become too defensive and arch to ever speak to one another. Taox’s tone held more warmth than Toland’s usually did. Perhaps because Eris already knew Taox was a teacher as well as an engineer, she could easily imagine Taox’s voice making gentle suggestions over a child’s work.

“Tell me,” Eris said. “How did it begin, with the Helium Court? Why does the Osmium Court fight them?”

Taox paused at the entrance to a narrow hallway to look back at her. Two krill engineers walked up the stairs behind them. Eris’ breath grew shallow, but the two kept walking. As soon as they saw Taox, they seemed reassured of the situation, and even straightened up slightly.

The chief engineer turned and walked beside Eris into the narrow hallway. “We had grown too many. Both of our continents were isolated. It was symbolic, to feed the many royal spawn to the court of the Helium Drinkers, but it was also practical. We could not feed them, and the Helium Court was small and starving. We give, we are taken from. It is comfortable and dark. But it worked too well. The Helium Drinkers grew strong, too strong too quickly. They thought they could invade us. Would they _eat_ all of us? We don’t know.” She sounded disgusted now in a way she had not before, then calmed again. “If it comes to war …

I trust you are here because you do not want it to come to war. Rioth would not have let you in otherwise.”

Eris said nothing.

“So they send emissaries first, to try to extract more tithes of lives, but they will be recording information about our fields and our factories at the same time. They will invade soon enough. I thought the engines could stop them, but …”

“You built these engines.” Eris prompted for more information.

A large, black door, carved in the shape of something like an ammonite, stood in their way. Taox stroked several arms of the sigil painted on the wall. They glowed bright green for a fraction of a second, then subsided as the door began to roll away, grating on its tracks.

Immediately the quality of the sounds around Eris changed. Everything closed in, noise muffled between heavy, black walls. Taox danced her fingers across the wall to close the door behind them.

“The batteries. I built only the newest iteration of the engines.” Taox reached up as if to lovingly touch the wall, but did not make contact. The cadence of her voice changed to a more reverent tone. “I made them more efficient, capable of carrying more current. I made the continent faster. In better ocean currents, or with more warning, we could have run away. Now … we’ll slow to let them dock. That’s what those engineers were on their way to do. It’s the right thing. Extend a hand, before we can prove our once-allies won’t bite it off. It’s the right thing.”

She spoke as if convincing herself, as if she had spent many nights trying to gently soothe herself into this conviction.

On the other side of the close, thin battery compartment was another ammonite door, and beyond that, the latticework of stairs and catwalks again. A distant sliver of white-and-green froth high on the left-hand wall showed water slowing in its churn.

The entire prow window wasn’t visible, being far enough away that several railings and suspended rooms crisscrossed it within the shell of the underside of the continent. The hum of the engines was softer and higher-pitched here. Eris imagined the prow must be small. What glass could hold up to the constant crash of waves against shore?

“The prow.” Taox leaned her arms on the railing. “Remember what I said. Destroy the white worm. It may not be alive, so I will not tell you to kill it. _Destroy_ it.”

“I will.”

“Then what you seek is one floor below you.”

The continent was obviously slowing now. Eris felt it rock under her feet. In the distance, something clattered to the floor, and a patch of stairs were swept into darkness. That explained the low buildings; nothing too tall was safe here. The lightning vanes were built so high only at great cost and risk.

Eris looked down, between the flights of stairs. Lights speared through the wall, flickering. If Taox could see them, she didn’t react.

“This is where I leave you,” Eris said, unable to keep the sadness out of her voice. She had left so many people, parted ways so many times knowing one or both or all of the people involved were going down a dangerous road. The first time she had guided kass through Crota’s tunnels. The corridors on the moon, where Kass had crawled through the same wet wreckage Eris had for three years.

When her first fireteam had scattered in darkness and confusion and betrayal, there had been no time for anyone to say goodbye. Not until much later.

Taox was not lost in tone or insinuation. In this way, she was not like Toland at all. Instead, it was with a Guardian-like straightforwardness that she hurried back toward the batteries, surely with something connected to her role as engineer in mind. She held Eris’ spear under her arm. It was an odd look for an engineer, but Eris suspected that, just as the created nature of the world kept Taox from wondering too much about the odd lights in the engines, no one would comment on it.

She descended two flights and found the sword/needle point in a tangle of pipes.

Why here? Was something about this place a thin point in the world? Had Kass decided where to put it? Had the Witch-Queen?

The latter seemed most likely, since the points were all so distant from one another.

Eris sat down and concentrated. The portal was difficult to look at straight on. A roiling cloud of yellow light in the middle kept forcing the eye away to it, to the patchy, translucent lines around them. These themselves were the swords/needles, pins of pure energy.

Eris drew the first one out like she was diffusing a bomb; with great care and with careful documentation of many, many individual steps. The needle shivered as she conjured warding spells around it and drew it away from the center. Reality would waver if she moved wrong. A hole, literal and symbolic at once, would rip through the universe Eris had created before it had sapped what Savathûn thought was a functioning Imbaru well.

Like the Cryptoglyph, it floated on invisible thread.

Like the world Eris had made, it was delicate and precise.

She felt the same satisfied fullness she had when she learned to shape the Dreadnaught.

Like a lock clicking, the needle fell out of place and dissipated harmlessly.

Eris looked up at where she knew the prow would be. Where the castle would be.

Two more anchor points to go.


	16. Chapter 14

Half-way up the hill toward the palace, the sisters began to talk of events Toland knew had never happened.

Aurash intended to visit the Tungsten Monoliths soon, she said. She had planned it for days. Her sisters agreed. Had the time finally come? Would she do it after all? Strange creatures and strange weather ranged around the Monoliths, and their exact properties had never been studied, beyond size and weight. She would take a piece. A noble and useful scientific endeavor for a potential future queen, this would please her father.

At the mention of his name, her sisters grew quiet.

The roads grew wider as they approached the palace, but it was to the scale of an ordinary city, not the Dreadnaught or even the Tower octant’s broadest promenades. Bristling buildings leaned over the streets right up to the rise on which the palace sat, its lower floors jutting out from the stone itself. Krill walked in twos and threes up and down the switchback road, making brief glances at the three children arranged behind Toland in a zig-zag of their own. The sky was a lighter gray, feathered with clouds, and the wind smelled almost as briny up here as it had on the dock.

At this height he could more clearly see the lightning vanes, and the web of wires that connected them and the strange, shimmering umbrella-tech above the city. Toland paused at one of the switch-back corners, boots digging into blue-gray gravel, and thought of Eris with a fizzle of warm static in his chest. He did not worry for her, but missed her powerfully. It hit him that this was the first time they had not been within rooms of one another for weeks. _How quickly you have grown to rely on her,_ said a cold and accusatory part of him. _Will she heed the same song you do? Will you be able to scheme and plan enough to have the loyalty of both Eris and Savathûn?_

_Mine is a perfect double agent heart._

Except that he did not want the power of the Hive in the same way he had before. Not because it paled in comparison to any power or satisfaction Eris could offer, but because they were different things entirely, impossible to compare one to another. The way to break the sword-logic was to make the definition of “victory” meaningless. Guardians were half-way to the theory and all-in on the practical with their resistance to death.

Only half-way.

Flush with secrets and longing both, standing in the shadow of the palace of the Osmium King, what did Toland have to worry him?

Perhaps the passers-by saw his knife-edged smile.

For whatever reason, he and the children were not accosted as they entered the palace complex. Like a medieval walled palace, the king’s court was only a small part of it. Winding, narrow streets connected functionaries’ and nobles’ offices. People talked and rustled long robes. What wonder! Its perch high above the waves gave it the appearance of a captain’s cabin on a prow, wider than it was long and with many windows with a view of the dark waves. Guards, their bone-white helmets decorated with blue and white striped barbs, stood at some of the doorways. Toland absently set a hand on Sathona’s and Aurash’s thin shoulders as the crowd thickened the further they walked. No one gave Toland a second look, and he knew from this that the story had folded him into itself. These people, these facsimiles, would see him as a krill like themselves, subject to krill rules.

The children seemed to know where to go. Toland found himself having to pay more attention to keep within arm’s length of them. There was so much else to draw his eye. The _libraries_ this place might have! The cryptoglyphs! Songs from as deep in the Hive’s history as anyone could ever know, filled with magics similar to the ones he knew but different in ways no one but himself, with his perspective from another world far in the future, could ever understand!

He looked up at the windows, trying to find a way to tell which might be a conservatory.

He could no longer feel the touches on his hands.

Krill crowds swirled. Tattered banners and dried coral fans hung over the narrow streets in calcified finery. It must mean he was very near the court now.

The children were gone.

Toland scanned the crowd, but was unable to see their bobbing heads anywhere between the taller people. If the princesses had their memories back, they must know this place better than Toland could ever hope to. They had been born in it. Toland’s chest ached. If the children were gone, then—

Well, the plan could continue. The kids were a key to get in, not the treasure behind the door. He didn’t _actually_ need them.

But he had started to feel responsible for them, and missed their voices. What would Eris say?

He shook his head, buffeted where he stood still in the busy courtyard. He could look for a library and the children, and the anchor point he was here to destroy, at the same time. Surely the simulation wouldn’t fall apart because the kids were no longer in arms’ reach.

If it did, he had Eris to worry about as well.

The library, it turned out, was public. He passed between tall shelves, study tables, and strange three-dimensional diagrams like forests of seaweed. He would have thought they were art if he had not seen krill concentrating deeply on moving their branches around in deliberate patterns. He lingered at each one, curious.

The chambers of the cryptoglyphs and songs were not in the public room. At the back of it, he found cordons, delicate blue strings hung with silver pendants. He stepped over them. Beyond them, the corridors grew darker and closer, with soft, blue shadows. The air felt dry after the seaside wet air, as dry as if it might crack. Here were the krill equivalents of cryptoglyphs, blue scrolls, marked with bioluminescent lights. He ran his hand along them, not knowing how to tell which were songs and which were stories.

_Do not tarry. Do not become lost in the riddle of it._

He pulled himself away by invoking a different desire: to see the Osmium King and the white worm. This would be the closest chance he ever got to taking a pilgrimage to where it all began.

The room of cryptoglyphs had no windows. Green-tinted lights grew on plant-like vines. Watery light fell from the floor above, flowing over the black, wrought metal bannisters of a spiral staircase. Toland ascended the stairs. Indistinct voices filtered down with the light.

The second floor was crowded. Krill sat at round desks. To eyes used to the Hive, they looked oddly human, but in the sigils at the desks and clothes he saw the unique hierarchy of the Court. Marks for scribes, intendants, farmers, students, seers, diplomats. He suspected there were many of the latter in the king’s libraries.

And guards. A krill in a sleek, reflective helmet, a silver that coruscated like pearl, noticed him immediately. If Toland had to guess gender he would have chosen male, on the path to become a knight, but even Hive gender was not as cut-and-dry as that. It would be safest not to address at all.

“Where is your mark?”

Toland stood tall and drew closer to the guard. They stood slightly taller than he did, but no matter. “Ah, good. Does the labyrinthine library not breed confusion? Like the lotus. Bring me to the court.”

To their credit, the guard did not even blink. “Get out of here!” They gestured toward the door. Diplomats looked up from scrolls.

“Such a way to treat an emissary!” Toland was struck with the brilliance of his own lie.

“Your mark?” The guard tapped their hands together impatiently and shuffled as best they could to stand between Toland and the now outwardly staring krill.

“We do not wear them.” He marched past the guard and into the unknown hallway beyond.

They shuffled after him, not yet drawing the whip-like weapon coiled at their side. “And what court is that?”

Ah yes. So clever. So impossible to disprove. Toland spoke in clipped tones over his shoulder. “Crota’s court. An emissary of the deathsingers, come to see the portal.”

Would other krill see their world the same way two-year old Xi Ro had? As filled with things larger and more mysterious than they were? Surely the guards would have more composure. Toland folded his own hands together and stood like he had once stood before the Vanguard, head high and shoulders stooped. Imagine standing this way before the water-gates of the court, the sluices for the tides used for augury.

“What portal?”

_Fools._

“Spearing light. Whirlpools of power. A hole in the world.”

The krill shook their head.

Toland could almost hear their thoughts. They thought him _addled_ , whatever that meant to the krill. He drew himself taller. “Would you keep us waiting? Would you delay the meeting with your king? We could make this continent prosperous for generations. If we do not, entropy will speed up for you until you can _see_ the world crumbling. Show me the prow.”

The krill patted the whip, but then removed their hand from it. They deliberated for two breaths, meting Toland’s eyes. Finally, they came to a decision. “Follow me.”

Toland did. Beyond the library the blue walls turned to gray. With no idea where the throne room was, Toland oriented by the ocean. “This is not the prow.” The hallway was empty. _Fools._

“We’ll see when you’re in front of the knights whether you have business with the court.”

Toland kicked the hand that had been holding the whip. Once, he could have put Void Light into it, but he had not been a Guardian for a long time. For now, the memory of generations-old Guardian training was enough to crush the hand against the wall and scare them long enough for him to jab for the eyes.

As the guard tried to cover his face and lash out wildly at the same time, Toland ran toward the prow.

For all he knew the most promising lead to an isolated wing, but it was worth a try. Past the library the halls were wide and easy to follow, empty of anyone studying or sightseeing. The architecture became more elaborate several closed rooms down, arches filigreed with shapes of alien sea creatures and what might have been krill heroes. Two more guards stood before an open room, and from that room he heard a voice whispering.

He slowed to a walk. The krill looked up, suspicious, but the other guard had not yet caught up. Toland could walk right past …

No. Shouts came from behind him, and he turned to see three krill springing into motion at once.

Toland ducked into the guarded room.

First an antechamber, walled with pearlescent shimmering plates. Then another door. He took a chance and burst through.

“Stop! Wait! You’re on king’s ground.”

The next room was smaller, with a narrow door on the other side identical to the one he had entered through. It was windowless, dark, and cool.

On the pedestal in the center sat the white worm.

 _Oh._ Toland’s thoughts raced. _This shouldn’t be here. This palace is huge. I shouldn’t have been able to walk into this room by accident. And the worm should be_ dead.

It was not. Three eyes looked out of a placid face crowned with spikes.

_“You shouldn’t be here either,” said the worm._

_“_ You.”

He wanted to compose a scathing reply. The words would almost come. Rhythm first and content second, each syllable fitting. Toland had not expected any of this. Not the chase, not the worm, not losing the children. From a distance he heard the guards’ armor clatter. They whispered between them, as if hesitant to invade the room they themselves had been tasked with keeping pristine.

Toland had wanted so badly to one day see this place, and now that he was here, he was given the luxury of seeing, alone, that which should not have been possible at all. The world Eris had re-created had a broken timeline if the worm was alive. No harm in listening to a facsimile of evil, was there? One evil nested inside another, the white worm hardly a cancerous spot on the Witch-Queen’s Dreadnaught? 

“ _I can grant you a wish_ ,” said the worm. “ _Anything. Just for the price of listening.”_

Toland felt a flare of bitterness at his own refusal. Before the Witch-Queen had offered him the same, he would surely have answered _yes_. What was it about him, that the Hive could see he wanted something they could give? Did the worm speak to only those it chose? It was especial vulnerability, not especial strength, the worms looked for. But he could only articulate this because he had refused the Witch-Queen in favor of Eris already.

Was it not correct and safe to accept that which offered you its’ hand?

Not always. There were other safe places.

Toland sighed, impatient, and turned away.

The three kill guards blocked the door, hissing. Both posted at the door to the private room were broad-shouldered knights, smooth-skinned and less skeletal than their Hive counterparts but with almost as much bulk.

Toland seized the closest knight’s throat. The whip lashed his side, and, _Light_ , he had grown so _unused_ to pain. Conjure old experiments, old deaths, decades and decades of gory thanatonautics. Let it just be pain. Pity it was so _intriguing._

He dropped the krill and slid under the second’s arm just as they raised the whip to strike. Dashing out the door, he tried to focus. _Remember the Dreadnaught. Remember the shaping. None of this is real. None of the sounds, none of the cool air. Fill in the cracks. Make new ones, and fill those too._

_Not what it is to be a Guardian, but what it is to unmake an illusion._

He sprinted toward the prow again.

How long had it been since this body had been tired? Shortness of breath reminded him whatever he was, it was not a Guardian. Hallways branched in unknown labyrinth turns, weapons bristling behind him. Through a window in one mad and random choice of turn he saw a glimpse of the gray sea five stories and a cliff-side below that. So close.

There. Green light slashed through the walls like a broken graphic on a screen. A moment of regret — would ruffling the guards tear up Eris’ plans for the world she had created? He wasn’t going to _kill_ anyone. Instead he endured a tense moment of choosing another blue hallway and finding, at last, a floor-length window onto the sea. The anchor point sat in a decorative alcove, one of the many niches of the palace. Toland could imagine courtiers planning approaches here, or the little princesses curled up on the cushions.

The guards were only delayed behind him because of the twisting hallways, likely not because he had hurt one of them. He would have to disarm this quickly. Memories of Guardian patrols bothered him unbidden. It would have been so easy if he just had to _step into a circle …_

Instead, he reached out his hands and felt for the grain in the walls around reality. Like the rock he had manipulated in the Dreadnaught, At last, one needle _snagged._ He drew it toward him.

The world shivered and rearranged. Toland grinned. When he tried to withdraw from the anchor point it felt like he was rising out of a deep sleep, a fog he had not noticed stealing up upon him. Groggily, he turned around from the anomaly the guards couldn’t see. The sitting nook had become a solid plane of one of the wall’s blue-gray hues.

The guards stopped, confused. The knight with the whip lumbered forward. Another tried diplomacy again, and from its words Toland suspected some of the last few minutes had been erased along with the chunk of the wall, never to be noticed by the simulated krill again. It had all been reset. “Stop going that way. From where have you come?”

 _Let us try again._ This time, Toland tried lowering his voice and speaking in the soft tones of a harmless scholar. It would serve. It had to serve. “Hello, esteemed persons. I seem to have gotten lost. I am an emissary of Crota’s court, and I am here to see the king.”


	17. Chapter 15

When Eris arrived at the palace, with no way to tell where Toland and the children would be, she quickly discovered she had a larger problem than meeting up with the only other real person in this world.

The palace had been locked down. She heard from a passerby that delegates were on their way, but surely, she suspected, the Osmium Court would not have dropped a translucent, quilted curtain over the main gate for the Helium Drinkers. The siege weapons were not as much a surprise, because their enemies had raided them, but the hubbub _inside_ the walls? That wasn't about the opposing continent. Not yet. Something else had happened while she was away.

Eris suspected she knew what it was. Someone had broken in, and the Osmium Court did not know where he had come from. Toland waited behind those walls. One way or another, he had finished part of his job—she had felt the needles let go of the world like a stiff joint cracking. They were one step closer to getting back to a world where their actions mattered to the people Eris cared about. Savathûn’s claws were letting go, one at a time, and she wouldn’t even notice it was happening.

For the first time in almost a week, Eris began to be able to imagine what her life might be like when her quest was over. She would be happy to go back to working for Mara and for the Hidden. (Idly she noticed Mara had not offered any help, and Kass had. The queen of the Reef was not a generous employer.) If she could return to a world where Savathûn was banished and Toland firmly on Eris’ side, things would be easier.

Toland’s commitment to her would itself be a welcome change. Being away from him while she was in the engines… No. She corrected herself. Being about to reunite with him dredged up years upon years of longing: first seeing him with Eriana, looking for him in the Pit, re-uniting with the incorporeal spirit he had become, approaching him as an emissary. Was love layers and layers of loyalty, thin, translucent sheets pressed on top of one another until some sheen built up from the depth of them?

As Eris walked closer to the palace, the press of krill grew thicker. People hovered outside the doors on essential business or errands they felt were time-sensitive, audibly wondering whether the doors would open soon.

No time to wait. Eris bared her teeth. If they had been Guardians in front of her she would have been tempted to hiss. _Get out of the way!_ She had _made_ this world.

If they had been Guardians and she had had her magic, she could teleport through the gates. The same should be possible here, in fact; everything she had done to enchant her now-lost spear had functioned just like it would in the real world. She closed all three eyes. The rustle of a krill’s clothing as they pressed against her arm in the crowd piqued her interest but did not stop her from whispering the names of runes under her breath. Green fire rose around her. Although it touched the krill around her, no one seemed to see it. _That_ was unusual, and fear traveled with her as she teleported toward the energy of the portal she knew sat somewhere in the palace.

Her breath caught with the beauty of the alcove where she stood when she re-appeared. The blue-gray corridors held the close grandeur that had appealed to her in the Dreadnaught, but not prickly, not intimidating and death-worshipping. These were spaces meant to be lived in, and to hold up against wind and ocean. She took a deep breath, felt the cooler air turn her ichor tears tacky. Much better than the crowd at the gate. Something in the architecture here reassured her..

As comfortable it was, no sign appeared to tell her which way to find Toland. He had cleared the portal anchor, which was a relief. Eris checked its remains, the holes in the walls of reality where it had been screwed in, and found them smooth and useless.

After checking, she moved into the hallway. Eris knew so well how to hold her head high in a frightening place, and so knew no one would realize how furtive she was being. Nevertheless she scanned carefully for watchers, unsure what reaction she would get if she was found here.

The first sign of occupation came not from any supernatural sense but from hearing. The familiar sound of krill children’s voices floated in from the left-hand hallway at a nearby intersection. Eris headed that way.

Sathona stood just outside an arched doorway. Beyond it, Eris saw a sliver of antechamber.

Time and space had sorted themselves out when it came to Sathona’s age. She stood shorter than Eris, but no longer moved with the clumsy abandon of a child.

“Eris!”

“Sathona.”

“You are just the person I hoped to see. Our father is in communion with the strange worm.”

The formal way she talked wasn’t much different from Eris’ own voice, but because it was an abrupt shift from baby-talk, it still sounded out of place to Eris’ ears. _Just like the Books of Sorrow. They are the daughters of a king, brought up in a wordy court._

Sathona continued. “He won’t come to the court. Everyone is nervous, but we can’t find Taox, and …”

Eris knew this story. The king had neglected his duties. It would be easy to set off a spark in the dry tinder the court already was. The Helium Court had been raiding the Osmium Court, and the reverse had perhaps only not happened because the Helium Court was smaller in number. Her krill could not afford to project an image of chaos.

“Come.” Eris held out a hand. “I will take you to the court and find Taox.”

Sathona nodded. “Let me get them.”

She didn’t need to explain who _they_ were. Instead she hurried inside and fluttered back out with an entourage of wide sleeves and bright spikes: her sisters.

As they left the king’s sanctuary they chattered among themselves. Sathona took Eris’ hand again without hesitation, her palm warm and hard with scales. Eris knew what she needed to do next: find Toland and find the third portal, the one she suspected sat on the Helium Drinkers’ ship. But thinking about the future had also activated a hesitation she suspected came from Savathûn. It felt part of herself enough for it to be a struggle to resist. Leaving Taox had been difficult. Leaving these children would be difficult, too. She tried to concentrate on their chatter and the bob of their heads around her. None of it was real. But was believing it madness? Or was there a different kind of madness in _not_ being moved by a world that looked true to all her senses?

These thoughts and the chatter of the children accompanied her to the court.

Krill stood in groups and lines around the wide, nacreous corridors near the front of the palace. The architecture here used heavy blocks instead of infinity edge tile, and baleful, stone krill faces peered out from on top of archways. The double doors that opened onto the palace’s main courtyard were ajar. Eris could not see but could hear the approaching Helium Drinkers, the slam of feet and the rhythmic thrumming of something that might have been a guitar.

Xi Ro saw the crowd and decided immediately that there was a better way than charging through it. “This way.” She tugged Sathona’s hand, and Sathona tugged Eris, and they passed through several labyrinthine hallways to a small, closed and curtained door.

The door was marked with several runes. Xi Ro tapped them in one order, then another. They fell into strands when they opened, and then the door folded away like a fan. Clearly practiced with going through this secret door to watch their father at his work, the three sisters hurried inside, hidden from the sight of the throne by the backs of lavishly dressed krill who were not paying attention to them.

Eris felt more obviously out of place when she stepped in so close to the throne, but no one paid attention to her either. All eyes were on the throne. A long, blue tongue of a carpet lead up to a simple stone chair. If the king of the krill had any of the size and presence of Oryx, the throne itself would not be the point. The king himself would show the prosperity of the continent, or should. Instead, he was gone, gnawed by a worm as surely as if it lay in his belly. Instead, a cluster of advisors stood, fidgeting, in front of the throne. Thick, floor-length cloaks and dresses obscured their legs. Eris had at first not noticed the nature of their jewelry, but now saw that instead of faceted gems they wore smooth sea-glass, in shades from silver to phosphorescent green.

At the front of the crowd before them, not quite daring to step on the runner in front of the throne, stood Toland. Eris watched him talk—not argue, but simply talk—to one of the courtiers, keeping their distance but appearing engaged and attentive to the conversation. He could be surprisingly gracious when he wanted to be, or when it was useful to him. She watched the set of his thin shoulders, the shift of his boots on the floor, and imagined another life for them.

If they were both courtiers they would spend their days here, and in the evening link arms and walk by the ocean, umbrellas held against the stinging water. They would lean on one another and speak about things neither of them had yet learned, and would be at peace. They might even have the luxury of being bored.

That particular part of the fantasy was dashed by the arrival of the Helium Drinkers. Eris watch Toland turn with the rest of the crowd as the main doors opened, and only then turned herself.

The Helium Drinkers approached, and in the press of people Eris could no longer see where Taox had gone. Spears with hooked ends and barrels like guns rose above the crowd. Mutters sprouted throughout the crowd and then grew quiet.

Without the king present, everyone had to wait. The room’s soft blue furnishings could not muffle or soften the obvious anger with which the envoys or warriors looked around. Once, Eris caught one the Helium Drinkers’ eyes and thought she saw a glimmer of recognition, or a similarity about the face to a memory of Savathûn she could not fully conjure. Eris gasped. A few krill around her startled, afraid someone would strike before the peace talks could begin. No one did, and the person who had caught Eris’ eye turned away, a green flame in their black gaze slowly dying away.

“Where is the king?” One of the armed emissaries finally shouted to a courtier who could not answer.

Just as Eris thought the wait might become violent, Taox slipped through the hidden door. Had the children showed her the way, or had she built it for them?

Taox caught Eris’ eye and whispered fast, knowing she was already out of time. “Still looking for strange lights?”

“There is one left.” Eris also spoke in a whisper. “We know it is on the far side of the island, but not where.”

“I’ll make you a deal.” Taox blinked all three eyes. “Watch the children tonight. Make sure no one hurts them while the Helium Drinkers are here.”

_Make sure no one uses them as levers for the court before you do._ Eris understood.

“Once you make it through the night, find me outside the engine access in the Bright District. And when I have created peace between two continents, I will find you and tell exactly where the next anomaly is.”

She shouldered between the courtiers faster than Eris could reply. Eris could go look for the portal without her information, she thought right away. But it would take just as much time, just as enough planning. She did not know where the ship was, how many Helium Court warriors there were, how they would respond to enemies in their midst, or whether her and Toland’s magical ease with the world would apply to the last portal.

Taox stepped out in front of the throne. She still carried the spear Eris had given her, and its heft made her look taller. As the courtiers made room for her, Toland slipped back into the crowd. With relief Eris saw him moving toward her, and moved in turn toward the children.

“Welcome!” Taox spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. “You come to us at a strange time. Please, allow us to show you hospitality before the king returns …”

If there was to be an argument, Eris did not see it. She bent down to speak to Aurash. “Come, child. Taox bids you go to bed while the court talks.”

“But they’re going to fight,” said Aurash. She sounded eager.

“They are going to talk. It will take a very long time.”

“If our father was here none of this would happen.” Sathona, petulant, was going to either resist or help. It turned out to be the latter. She took her siblings’ arms and wove with them through the crowd. Eris did not take her eyes off of them as they walked, and they left by the hidden door with no event but one: Toland was standing in the hall when they emerged. The chatter of the crowd faded away. The guard posted here did not look a second time at the princesses or the people who had already cast their glamour. 

“We have a job,” Eris said to him at once, with pleasant surprise more reminiscent of fireteam banter before the Pit than anything related to Fundament.

“What job is that? Such a delight to get to see this court in action, although here we are leaving before the pot truly boils over. I could look at this forever, Eris.”

“As could I.” She spoke softly, then raised her voice again for the children. “If we all go to bed and wake up tomorrow, there’ll be a reward from Taox.”

“What if we _don’t_ wake up?” Xi Ro sounded curious.

“That’s normal, but I wouldn’t like it,” said Aurash.

“Taox said _you_ get a gift, not us.” Sathona looked around. “But she gets like this. And Father does. They’ll both be back. We’ll see …”

The sad resignation in her voice filled Eris’ heart. Such disciplined and serious children, because they had to be!

“You will have to show us to your room,” Eris said. “We do not know the way.”

“And we’ll disable the traps,” said Sathona.


	18. Chapter 16

The princesses had a suite to themselves, not a single room. At least three chambers and a balcony clung to the side of the palace wall like a honeycomb. Unlike in the court, the stone walls were smoothed over with interlocking tile. Plants or flexible sculptures of plants separated one room from another, giving the warren a feeling of being outside even though it was under a heavy, almost oppressive dark blue roof. Krill furnishings tended to woven chairs and stone or glass tables. Nothing furred lived on their continent. Rugs and cushions were made of layered, soft-scaled skins.

Eris couldn’t even see the full depths of the rooms, the plant-things so obscured them. The result was cozy, if clearly designed for a child’s scale. Perhaps there were even more rooms she couldn’t see, the nests of dead sisters honeycombing back and back into the walls. On the right a balcony hung out above the court, the tower it branched from well inside the wall but still seeming, to Eris, like a hubristic move for a court that tended to assassination.

That assassination was the reason for the traps. The children pressed runes in sequence before they passed through the doorway, then orbited the room touching other parts of the wall.

“If we don’t touch them, the room will burn,” said Xi Ro, fascinated.

“There are flare wires in the walls.” Sathona’s addition was matter-of-fact.

The princesses settled in on their own, disappearing in and out of the frond doors. Eris retreated to Toland’s side. He had been quiet the whole way up, examining the palace itself with the same intensity he gave to the Hive. In another universe he could have been a Tower researcher, hunched over work Ikora had sanctioned. In another world … Eris’ thoughts wandered. In another world, her fireteam members could all have had peacetime work. Of all the worlds the Witch-Queen had shown Eris, seeing Eriana and Wei Ning at leisure had been the most tempting.

She mulled over those thoughts, stirring fantasy and memory together. Perception fogged as if she could feel Toland thinking beside her. Her mind wandered, not unpleasantly, until the princesses started a new game in the common room. They talked rapid-fire, referencing people and places Eris did not know and could not have invented: Raxoth the smith, the Steel House, a feast of fish and insects. They sat on round stools and talked without gesturing, occasionally flicking a blue barbel. The room smelled of rain and the slick brine of the krill.

After the initial hubbub died down, Aurash looked at Eris with more solemnity. “I’m going away again soon, you know.”

That _again_ struck her. It shouldn’t be there. Aurash should not know she had been gone before. But Eris waited, resisting a skeptical expression.

“To the Tungsten Monoliths.” Aurash raised her chin, as if waiting for Eris to challenge her.

“The palace will be poorer without you, and your discoveries will enrich it,” Toland said.

Eris hoped her surprise at his grace did not show.

“We will not be staying long either,” Eris said. “We have work to do.”

She expected the krill to be upset. She had, perhaps, mentioned it because of the defiance in Aurash’s own announcement. Just as she began to regret that, they all nodded.

“We know,” said Sathona. _Why did it have to be Sathona?_ “People leave a lot.”

“Our sisters,” said Xi Ro.

“Our parents.”

“It’s part of being royalty,” said Aurash.

“No, it’s not.” Sathona’s barbels flared. “It’s because our father is no good at diplomacy. He’ll let us be eaten.”

“He won’t…” Aurash did not sound convinced.

“One of us will sit on the throne next, and we’re given enough food because of it,” said Xi Ro.

The argument was polite and had a sense of resiliency to it that reminded Eris of Guardians, or of her old self. Some argument would not break their relationship. Now used to taking things hard, to a mind no longer at ease with even joking barbs, Eris found their resilience alien. It did not matter what species spoke it.

Something else also bothered her. The princesses had so quickly moved on from the prospect of Eris leaving. She supposed it should reassure her that they would not be hurt or cause a fuss. Even a facsimile of grief would hurt her. But she had also wanted some acknowledgement of the work she had done, the bond she had felt growing between herself and her imaginary wards.

Toland wandered off. No closure would come from that quarter. Dimly, she noticed him moving from one set of rune-traps to another, examining them.

“But _you_ aren’t dying?” Sathona said, curious.

Relief filled Eris strong enough she thought she might sigh. “No. We are going on a different journey.”

“That’s good. Krill die easily. I wondered whether you would live as long as us, or shorter, or something else.”

“I am not unlike the krill in that way. Our years are different. But I’ll age all the same.”

“I think you’re krill,” said Xi Ro.

Eris smiled. She was glad it did not come from Sathona. She would have too easily heard Savathûn saying ‘I think you’re Hive,’ a temptation she would, thankfully, never bother or know to make.

“We have told you this,” Toland said, distantly. “We’re human, but we’re like the Hive. Like but unlike the krill.”

“That was a pretend game!” Sathona protested. “We were playing at being emissaries.”

“There was truth in what we said.” Eris nodded. “Both of us.”

“You look like krill,” Aurash said, then almost immediately seemed to re-think the statement. “Except you have smooth skin, and you’re round. But you have the right eyes.”

“They weren’t always our eyes.” Eris touched her veil. Sitting down on the low stool, she was almost at the height of the children’s eyes. “I can show you.” It astonished her how easily she offered. In the Tower, it would have been impossible. With Toland, it would have been fraught. In front of three-eyed children, with scientific curiosity, it felt right.

The krill glanced at one another, then asked questions one after the other. Had her eyes been hurt? Did she need a healer? The questions could have easily become offensive, but none of them asked her how the hurt had happened, or whether she could still see. They focused on change, not capacity. Perhaps it stemmed from their nature as metamorphosing prey on a dangerous world. Everything was painful and changing, all the time. There was no reason to talk about those perpetual truths. Or perhaps they were showing their training in diplomacy after all.

Either way, Eris found it easy to set aside first her headdress and then her veil. A flash of shame accompanied the careful folding of the sodden veil, to keep the black ichor from touching the stool, the headdress, or the floor. Then she sat quite comfortably with the sea air ruffling the patchy, fuzzy remains of her black hair. The krill, recognizing their own species in the short horns growing above her ears, reacted with recognition and relief. Eris was tempted to scratch her head, to dig at the skin around the smaller, less symmetrical patches of chitin and horn that dotted her forehead and scalp. She resisted, curling her hands on her legs. Without the veil her vision grew a bit fuzzier, since it helped maintain the darkness in which she saw most clearly. But the cloudy skies of Fundament were kinder to her than Earth’s, and the difference was not uncomfortable.

“You see where the chitin touches smooth skin?” Eris asked.

The princesses reacted with nods, and then lost all curiosity. This was the best possible outcome, Eris thought; no fuss, no pity, and certainly no disgust. They accepted her effortlessly. It should perhaps not be surprising, since Toland’s newest form also had Hive eyes embedded in chitin on a human face. But because he had chosen or been given that form for an entirely simulated body, his eyes did not bleed. Eris doubted he had the same urges she did, to pick at her scales or try to uproot her horns. The princesses seemed to know these things and react with attentiveness and compassion, but not the disgusted compulsionshe had feared.

Aurash approached her solemnly. “If you must go …”

“After tonight,” said Eris. “When Taox comes back as your teacher.”

“After tonight, remember us. We like you,” she said, with the sincerity of children and the care of a princess raised among wartime diplomats.

Aurash reached out and Eris reached back. The kids piled onto the stool with her, an embrace of small claws on her shoulders. Tendrils flicked at her face and just as quickly were withdrawn. The krill were not cuddly, and neither were they ashamed. They let go of her quickly and sat and talked among themselves for a few minutes before dispersing to bed. Remarkably resilient, Eris thought. They took in stride what someone else—surely not her, but someone she imagined wearing her face—might weep for.

Fundament’s long days meant this was not evening as she knew it. Some light still hovered behind the clouds. She did not know how long the children would sleep or where the sun would be when they awoke. Perhaps she would be disoriented later, but for now she was still not tired. Instead, the brightness of the evening and the sharp smell of the ocean gave her clarity.

She realized she had lost track of Toland.

No use looking inside the thicket of ferns, cabinets, hallways, and curiosities that was the princess’ warren. She found him quickly enough on the small balcony.

Cool breeze smelled like salt, thick enough to taste. Beneath the brine a more acidic smell insisted that this was not the oceans of Earth. The whole world was corrosive, and the krill and all their neighbors crowded on disintegrating sheets and _thriving_. The engines still ran, the lightning rods still caught at the sky. The krill had been precious in the way any species was precious: for how easily it could become extinct, how hard it had to fight to survive.

The silvery lights from palace windows caught on the bow curve of Toland’s lips. She joined him on the balcony and rested her forearms on the low coral railing. Dimly she was aware of the breeze stirring her short hair, and then realized with a shock that she had never shown Toland her bare face. It would have felt fetishistic for him to fawn over a Hive face in the past, when she had not been sure that he cared for _her._ But when she looked at him she admired the way his horns extended the gaunt lines of his face, and enjoyed the glow of his eyes.

He looked out at the city until he felt her attention, then turned.

She felt there was something to say after the conversation with the children, but did not know what, and instead pulled off her gloves. She reached for his face. Immediately he leaned in and closed his eyes, his lips quirking into a small smile. She traced the edge where the chitin seamed into skin, then the scar on his face and the corner of his lips. He leaned lower and she traced up into his hair, losing the thread of the seam.

“I asked you for three kisses,” she said. “We have been human enough. Here on Fundament … I have wanted you more for being alien, too.”

He opened his eyes. “You are not Ir Yût. You are not our enemy. We have both loved what hated us, haven’t we?”

“We no longer have to.”

To reach the horns at the back of his head she had to move closer, an embrace with both of her hands in his hair. She felt his hands on her back a second before she grasped the horns and pulled him tight against her. His breath felt hot against the eternal-evening air.

“I would choose you over anyone,” he said, his breath shot. She had heard him worshipful enough times to know this as something different.

“You have. And I …” She wanted to kiss him and forced herself to wait, enjoying the ritual they had made. “I appreciate that you want all of me, Hive and human. You’ve proven already where the line is drawn…”

While she was speaking he raised a hand to her chin and then the bridge of her nose. She could no longer find the breath when he stroked between her two eyes to the third. His expression remained arrogant, arch, almost scornful. The lid closed against his fingertip, both of their heartbeats clear through the thin skin.

Closer still as she steadied herself against him and held the sides of his face. She blindly pulled him in for the kiss. He hesitated the instant his lips brushed hers, and a flash of irritation lit the anticipation before she felt his fingers exploring her hair. It seemed he touched every scale and horn, drawing out desire and an insistent, alien feeling of acceptance. He kissed her gently, all soft heat, pleasant but indistinguishable from their reverie on the ship. Something was missing. The touch was right, the emotion wrong.

_We vowed Hive, not krill._

“Hive, not krill,” she said, and bit him on the side of the neck.

She felt the tension leave his face at all once. In relief or surrender he slumped against the railing, taking her weight in his arms. She tasted copper and felt the bruise begin. For a still moment she stayed there, her lips against his bleeding skin, all her eyes shut. Then he pushed his hand between her chin and his neck and guided her gaze back to his face. The sharp edge of his thumbnail traced up her chin to her lips, then dug into a crack in the skin. No copper, but a sliver of pain.

Her mouth watered. She swallowed and looked at him.

“I prefer to be hurt.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if giving a lecture. In contrast, while he spoke he nudged nose-to-nose to her, his hand against her throat. “But you tell the terms of this logic.”

“If I held a knife, I would trace over your old scar and lick the blood.” She liked the fury in her own voice. They both knew where they stood, now. They would not wound each other out of malice. “I would linger until Taox calls us.”

He laughed, disappointed. “And she will.”

“Then let only the engines part us.”

Then the kisses were a fight, movement she could not keep track of but did not need to. A sense of comfort filled her, wild and inexorable as the ocean at his back. Then he turned and pressed her to the balcony wall, his mouth open against hers. Again her hands found the base of his horns, tracing up and down the rough surface as they kissed. They spoke furious and cursed words, spells that sharpened pain and raised energy and cast their faces in not ocean blue but poison green.

It had to end. They still had work to do here. It ended with Eris laughing, the sound low and strange even to her. Toland had bit her below her ear, leaving a welt to match his neck. Now he examined her hands, testing the bend of her fingers like a torturer, then bent to ease her thumb and her forefinger apart and kiss between them, the width of his jaw straining her fingers.

“Remember … remember the engines,” she managed.

He stopped at once, so that it seemed he bowed to her, then stepped fully away. His expression was fond, his eyes dimmed to gentle mint. She took deep breaths, the green fog fading, the acidic smell of the air prickling in her nostrils. She tried to smile, found she already was. The rest of the palace was silent, sleeping or in debate in the court. No enemies crawled up the high walls or plummeted down from the towers.

“We must still stay awake, to fulfill our task.” Toland leaned on the railing beside her and extended a hand. She took it, and watched the white lights and dark blue streets of the city below their clasped fingers. Her mind felt still, no whispers of dark magic or the whispers of her own worries. In happiness she waited for dawn.


	19. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to wordswithout for writing about 500 words of this story when I was extremely stuck. I'll pay you back in fight scenes soon, just like the good ol' days.

The palace of the Osmium King swayed on its pendulum foundations.

An attack by the Helium Drinkers did not come as a surprise. It was, as far as Eris understood, a formality. Cultural context she did not have dictated that the krill responded to this with efficient, calm defense.

Nevertheless, it was with shallow breath that she watched the electric blue plumes rocket into the far wing of the palace. The city was just beginning to wake up, people filing into the palace on foot for work or audiences with the court. There were people in that wing she saw even now collapsing, gray stone flaking off into the streets.

Tragedy on tragedy for the false krill. They had not deserved the Hive, as the Guardians had not. For long hours Eris had imagined that assassins would find the princesses in their warrens. When she grew tired of watching from the balcony, she she had imagined seeing the portal at the seaside disappear, a lime green tower flaring into life and dying after a second of phosphorescent burn. The night ending only lit an urgent fire under her feet. The last portal _must_ be closed. She _must not_ sink into the succor of this make-believe world, just as she had not lost herself in the worlds the Witch-Queen had made. It was no less a lotus land for being hers.

She and Toland had taken turns sleeping until dawn, talking and holding each other. This, among everything, was the greatest comfort. His presence silenced her racing thoughts, if only for a short time. 

But as the palace shook, that short time was over. The krill princesses survived the night. Eris hurried to find them.

Plants rustled as the princesses meandered into the common room. Sullen two-year-olds, they slouched as they moved aside thin tiles to reveal a pool of algae-speckled water underneath. Into this they cast fishing lines and pulled up sea slug-like animals, red speckled with yellow, which would serve as breakfast freshly killed. Either the Osmium Court had never had servants or this generation’s king had been negligent in organizing them. On the end of the fishing line was a short rod and a hook, with which Xi Ro killed and cleaned the food down to red flesh.

Eris’ thoughts threatened to wander away from the gooey sight. She felt comfortable but _tired._ She felt the disorientation of waking up too early, of seeing an alien sun rotating at the wrong speed around an unknown horizon. Space lag.

“Do you want one?” Sathona asked, holding up a limp nudibranch.

Eris considered.

Hands slapped on the doorframe. Taox stood there, her eyes wide and shoulders hunched. “Eris! If you are going to go, you have to go now. They’re going to launch.”

Eris spared just a glance to see that Toland waited at her shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, then was stopped by a pang, an unexpected ache. “Soon.”

The kids were eating, sitting together in an uneven fall. Aurash sprawled on the floor, her knee bent over Xi Ro’s ankle. Xi Ro sat up straight, but occasionally swayed, as if she had not yet awoken. Sathona stood farther from them, a cleaned slug in her hands while she listened to the adults.

Eris turned to her. It was difficult to get the words out. She had always determined to speak with conviction, because the things she fought had never hesitated to proclaim their wicked ambition. It had been true when she had been a Guardian, too. Guardians had only reacted to it poorly once she no longer was one.

“I have no more to feed you,” Eris said.

Sathona held a slug out to her.

Eris smiled. “Not now, child. We must go. The enemies at your gates _will not_ kill you.”

“Have you completed your job?” Xi Ro asked.

Eris studied the slug, still being proffered at her, its underbelly off-white and far too reminiscent of the white worm. It was easier just then to look at the thing that was already dead rather than the thing she was killing. She had expected this to be easier.

"Have you?" Xi Ro said again, without looking at her. Only Sathona was looking at her and there was something challenging, something inexplicably _old_ in that gaze that had never been there before. Maybe Eris had never noticed it before. A bit of lunacy, that she should discover something new _now_ after all her time here.

"Yes," she said. "I have. Now I must go."

"And when will you be back?"

"She will not," said Sathona suddenly. The slug drooped in her hand. "Of course she will not. This is how it's done, you know that. The leaving."

_"_ Not Eris," said Aurash quietly from her place on the floor. "She brought us all the way here to stay."

"I have..." Eris thought of all the reasons why indeed she would leave. The recitation felt exhausting, and why should it? why should any of this be so hard?

Sathona said, "You know people leave," directing it toward her sisters as though Eris were already gone. There was a tightness in her jaw as she spoke. “All of our sisters were eaten, and our father is all but gone.”

"I must go the Helium Drinkers’ ship to save my people," Eris said, hearing the strain in her own voice now. To beg her case with these children! These figments! But the last week was no figment in her mind. Nor was the expression crossing Sathona's face, all a jumble: resignation and distance and underneath all that the faint edges of a real childish pout. Easier in some ways to look at than the expressions of the other two, which were just confusion.

Xi Ro said, "But when you are done you could return. Weren't you happy here?"

"Of course," said Eris. _I was._ ”This is not - my going is not because of you. And you will..." She fell silent, struggling.

Sathona saw it and knew. "We will be fine together here," she said, smiling. "We understand. Of course you must go."

Eris stood looking at them. With Savathûn’s spell undone, these projections would be cut off into nothingness. But would they take this ache in her breastbone when they did?

Instead she would cut herself off. "I must go," she said. "You - you _will_ be safe."

Xi Ro and Aurash were both still focused on eating. Aurash only shrugged. "Goodbye then," she said. Those two _did_ know people left; they would adapt quicker than Sathona. Sathona, who had listened to Eris’ stories. 

Sathona who brought the ignored nudibranch to her own mouth and bit deep into the soft, white meat of it. She hardly seemed to chew before she swallowed. None of it real, Eris reminded herself, for all the good it would do. "May you be safe as well," Sathona said. “I will remember what you taught us.”

If only they could have remembered the _sharing_ aspect of the negotiations, not the _dealing_ itself.

Toland took her elbow, and Eris walked past Taox, and out into the war.

* * *

The third portal was not inside the Helium Drinkers’ ship. It sat on top of it.

Eris and Toland climbed the barnacle-crusted side. It had begun to rain, and the same drops that sizzled on Eris’ hat and gloves sparked off the helmets of the Helium Drinker soldiers below. This dock sat outside the city’s umbrella-shields, and whether this was because the shields could not reach or an intentional inconvenience for the enemy she did not know. She hissed and snatched her hand close as an acidic drop slipped through her glove. Strong enough to keep her three remaining holds, she still couldn’t resist looking down. The ranked soldiers swayed beneath her feet.

Toland had it worse. Bereft of even a cloth head covering he had been forced to steal and carry a fibrous awning left abandoned by a dockside vendor. It wouldn’t stay over his head easily, so his climb was slow, half his effort extended on keeping the awning around his head and shoulders like a cloak. Neither of them would last long up here. Soon, the rain would begin to burn through.

Eris could see the portal. “Only one more climb. We grow ever closer to breaking the Witch-Queen’s hold, reuniting with the Guardian, and stopping the Hive.”

Toland’s grim response was drowned out by the rattle of soldiers marching below.

Her arms aching, Eris heaved herself up over the top of the ship. Rigged like a sailing ship, it could not have an open deck in the poisonous rain and was therefore curved on top like a submarine. The blue-black, coral-like surface stretched large enough that what might have been a conning tower was lost in the sheets of rain. The green cage of the portal shone bright against the blue surface and the storm gloom.

Toland’s footsteps staggered behind her. The awning flapped, trying to catch the wind and soar back to the dock. Eris reached into the portal, feeling for the now familiar texture in the air.

A force grabbed her around the waist. Instead of feeling the world pop back into place, it turned inside out. She _fell_ , vertigo spinning in her gut. The world went black. Everything _changed tempo_ , time recalibrating.

When

She

Woke

Up

She was real.

She was _hungry_ , and her eyes and her knees both ached, and the gray rock of the moon stretched out before her. Cold air snatched at her. She hung in the air in a canyon, a sliver of silver lunar plain cast with deep shadows illuminated not far in front of her. To Eris’ right, a ball of lightning thrashed back and forth as if in an invisible cage. Toland.

Something crawled along the top of the canyon, black against gray. The body was a mass of claws and limbs, but on the formless head she saw a crown and recognized her for what she was: the Witch-Queen, closer than she had ever been before. Why here? Eris wondered. Why did Savathûn descend from her singularity throne and command her legions from the front? Was she so certain of victory? Her dark form disappeared over the rim of the canyon, sparing not even a glance for the people she had pulled out of her simulation. She was on her way to something else.

Eris struggled.

“A horizon broken at last!” Toland sounded energized. It was strange to see him again as the scrap of consciousness he really was. Before Savathûn’s attack, they had not talked in person often, far more through letters. She would have to look at him a few times to be sure he was real. “We’re winning, Eris! She was forced to break the trap before we could break out ourselves.”

“At last.” Eris looked at her own hands. This _was_ real, back in the natural flow of time. The Earth was out there, and with it the Last City, and am army of Hive on the way.

Solar and Arc Light flared at the mouth of the canyon. Eris slammed on the invisible walls of the field that held her. She patted down her tool belt, making a hurried inventory of whether any of the things she had carried here with her could make a spell to break the new trap.

“Guardian!” Toland shouted. “Attend! You have allies in this dark place.”

But if anyone heard his proclamation they were too occupied to enter the canyon. More attacks flared, and then Eris heard the rattle of gunfire. Whatever the Guardians were doing out there, they were doing it in Savathûn’s shadow.

A Guardian rounded the corner with familiar guns and an unfamiliar sword. Eris felt a wash of relief.

“Kass!”

But even as she called out, the air shimmered. Clothed in the best the Tower could make, powered by the clean, cold anger of a righteous person, the hero of the Red War stepped into the rippling doorway of one of Savathûn’s simulations and disappeared.

* * *

_Two hours earlier._

Kass, the Guardian who slew Oryx, now held a sword that could never have belonged to the Hive.

It was the metal, first of all, that would have marked it as human. The blade had been mined, not grown, and smoothed by Last City smiths into a silver spike. Sweeps of orange and green light criss-crossed the blade occasionally, faint for now. Guardian Light and Hive magic were both parts of this sword like pins in a lock.

“Are you sure?” She asked twice, to Commander Zavala. He had just told her to leave Earth. From her ship hanging between Mercury and Venus she couldn’t see any sign of the explosions behind Zavala on the video screen. But there, on the planet where Kass had been born and reborn, tombships were punching through atmosphere at rates not seen in a thousand years. Hive were, unusually for them, using broad barrages more expected from the Cabal. Someone new had come to their throne, and she had decided to add bombing to subtlety.

_They’re desperate_ , Ikora had said. _Eris must be striking at Savathûn now, to provoke a response like this._

“I will not let this Tower fall.” Zavala’s brow furrowed. “But Eris is our best hope against the fleet. Free her from wherever she has been taken. Between the two of you, you’ll be most efficient on the Moon.”

Zavala, always thinking about efficiency. “I won’t let you down,” said Kass, and started the engines.

* * *

Six Guardians landed on the moon.

These were the people who had killed Oryx, who had pushed back Ghaul. Kass relied on them to be strong and composed and, most of all, to be _present_ , an ever-standing wall against which evil broke.

Six Guardians fought through layers of defenses. The moon had changed since they last saw it. A Raid’s worth of decisions and counterattacks and vistas took place while Eris tried to keep herself awake on Fundament and ran through the night.

By the time they reached the Witch-Queen, the team was tired but as single-minded and united as a machine.

When someone had to go for the canyon first, they were in agreement that Kass should do it. _Explore_ , Eyahn said. _Don’t get killed._

The underbelly of the thing — Kass was almost certain she was not looking at the true form of the Witch-Queen — undulated above her. One spot looked more like skin than shadow, a scaled, green scar. She looked up past the tip of her blue and orange sword at it. It had not yet turned that crowned, empty face to look at her.

But there, in front of her, was a closer target. Eris and Toland, floating eight feet in the air, fought to escape invisible bonds.

Kass had two choices: go for Savathûn’s weakness, or rescue her captives.

As she chose, the air shimmered.


	20. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Eris and the Guardians begin their Raid against Savathûn, the Witch-Queen has one more trick in her arsenal of alternate worlds. And the problem with this one is that Eris can’t remember she’s being tricked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Krill kids fan art!!](https://flowers-of-io.tumblr.com/post/632678128725147648/in-august-i-came-across-the-outstanding-piece-of)
> 
> When I started this fic with the explicit goal of it being the most self-indulgent thing possible, I hoped but did not assume that other people would follow along. Thanks a lot to everyone who has commented and made art! I think you can safely expect the last couple chapters to update more quickly than the last few months have suggested, now that my other large project is done.

Many things happened at once.

Eris fell to the ground. Kass’ boots hit the regolith beside her, dust puffing up, and then the end of the Guardian's sword stabbed into the rock. The swing with which she cut the spell had been completed. Toland darted free. But at the same time, Eris learned the team of Guardians didn’t know what arena the Witch-Queen fought on. Kass disappeared, whisked away into another world or the Ascendant Plane as easily as Eris had been when this all began.

But Eris was free, and remembered what she had learned. First, dig in. Find out if _this_ is a simulation. She clawed her hands into the regolith and could find no ontological seams. Her mind raced, and she took deep breaths to try to quiet the doomsaying that bubbled up. _The Witch-Queen will imprison us all. She holds the reins of sight and sound. The Dark mistrusts her._

A glance up and Eris saw the wisp that was Toland. Even his ascendant form filled her with relief. At least, after all of this, she now knew she could rely on him.

No more Guardians appeared in front of the Earth. Savathûn’s footsteps rattled and crunched around Eris like the sound of a train. Glad to be back in the real world, Eris also struggled to think what weapons could stop Savathûn that the Guardians would not already have tried on the besieged Earth.

Savathûn stepped closer. She walked hunched over, almost on all fours. Her head and face were elegant, like the face of the Sphinx on the lion’s body.

She swiped Toland with her claws, and he tore into tatters.

Eris’ stomach turned in fear and grief. Without her Ahamkara bone she did not know what to conjure, and Kass had taken her sword. She jumped onto Savathûn’s arm and began to climb, teeth gritted, unsure where she would find a weak spot but certain she could stab something into the soft parts between her enemy’s chitin. She began to chant a spell of resilience, to draw, as she hated to, upon the magic of the Hive.

Savathûn stilled. Eris climbed, jumped from her arm to her shoulder, from her shoulder to her eye. Savathûn creaked when she moved. Each eye, as big as Eris’ body, glowed like a luminous pool. Eris reared back to stamp on the left eye. _For Toland. For Kass. For all my time in the pit._

She put her foot down into a swirling portal. It flashed with Taken black and gold, with Hive green, with that sensation of thin and peeling skin that came with falling through worlds.

Consciousness dropped away.

* * *

Eris lay on her side, the edge of a wool blanket curled comfortably under her nose. Soft, green light suffused the room, smearing out from a stone lantern. The room was small, just large enough for herself and Toland and the neat workbench at the foot of the bed. Her mind was quiet, focused on the warmth of the blanket and the person beside her. She had meaningful work ahead of her and felt sure she would find some joy in doing it. The archives needed easy tending.

Toland slept, his breath slowly rising and falling. The blanket bunched up at the back of his neck. Eris closed her eyes and gingerly rested her forehead against the blanket, enjoying the warmth and his presence. She knew she could trust him to be exactly what he was: capricious, aloof, moved by strange tides. Her mind joyously quiet, she sank back toward sleep.

She woke up to dim warmth. At some point while she had slept, he had moved. This was all right. This was safe. They would both be awake for the ceremony tomorrow.

Her Ghost bobbed in the air in front of her, pale blue flanges spinning.

“Eris. Eris!”

“Brya.” Eris reached out a hand. Prominent on her skin were the scars from the Victory, the decisive battle that had won the Moon for the Hive. Smaller cuts and burns marked the last-ditch rebellion Eris had later come to regret so strongly, the one which had taken the lives of half of her fire team.

Neither the scars nor the memories marred her at all. Regardless of her rebellion in the past, today’s ceremony would be beautiful. Toland would look dangerous and handsome in bone and ichor, and Eris would look mature and fey in green glass. This would be exactly what would be expected of her, and exactly what was appreciated about her. Everything had fallen into place.

“Amanda is here,” Brya said, green puffs of magic dissipating where her perimeter met the open air. “She’s looking for a rune.”

Eris cuddled the Spirit against her cheek before answering. “Please tell her I will meet her shortly.”

Amanda — an early riser. Usually, the Sparrow pool wouldn’t have much use for archivists. Today, the need made sense.

Eris let Brya go and turned to Toland. She touched his shoulder. When he roused softly she could feel the huff of his breath against her hand. _My second heart._ On a whim, she kissed his cheek. He awoke fast and reached back to cup the side of her head in a gentle, wiry hand.

_Bury us together_. Two bodies, their backs and shoulders and heads terraces of scale and bone, their eyes given to their queen and their throats engraved by her songs. _Oh Ur, keep us here forever._ On a languid morning, full of progress, even the ache of her three eyes and the weeping from their roughly-sewn-in edges didn’t matter.

Toland would rise late and work late. Eris headed out into the workshop without him, a tiny wisp of regret touching her good mood with delicious melancholy.

Outside their small bedroom stood the workshop, crowded with crystals, tools, leather and spell books. Beyond that, the Tower wall library, the vaulted room a tiny sliver of the ancient, ruined fastness. When Savathûn had taken Earth, had taken the Heart of the Black Garden and remade a portion of humanity in her image (after all, humanity was very good at spreading wars), she had also taken the legendary Last City. The Traveler broken, some now-Lightless Guardians had rebelled. Savathûn’s Hive magic ruled, the left-over offshoots of the Traveler and the Heart just improvisations in her eternal song. Even Ur was ultimately controlled by the Witch-Queen. And through her magic Eris found her meaning.

There was Amanda, and there was the engine, a mixture of metal and grown stuff. The two women talked about magic and reverse engineering, and when Eris had a sense of what she needed to do, she crouched down beside the cart.

She worked for an hour, and then noticed that her Ghost was fluttering nervously around the room.

Eris looked at her. “Does something unsettle you?”

“I don’t like this,” Brya said.

Eris took her hands out of the oily vine-wires to gather the Ghost back to herself. “The engine? Is it broken in a way I cannot see?”

The wisp of green light, fuzzy at the edges like a dandelion head, darted back and forth. “Not the engine. I just get nervous around the ceremony.”

Eris sat back.“You never told me this.”

“We Spirits, we’re creatures of magic. Our Queen created us as a reminder of her defeated enemy and a way to focus her magic through her people. But we’re a little bit of something else, too. The old Light. I was a Ghost once. And I think the feeling is just left over.” The Spirit made a flicker of soft green that Eris could read as clearly as if it was one of Toland’s sweeping gestures.

Eris looked up, to the wide, glass windows angled against the ceiling, and saw the cracked egg of the Traveler, and the Worm wrapped around the girders. Golden light filtered through the dusty glass. Each sight of Ur the Ever-Hunger made Eris feel stronger, lighter, more proud. She served the greatest beings in the universe, and for her own hunger not to be satisfied was the whole _point._

Eris looked forward to the ceremony, but saw no need to disturb her Spirit further. Brya had been with Eris since she had been reborn. Through multiple rebirths. She often seemed as close as one of Eris’ limbs to her body. Losing Brya would not only cut off Eris’ access to the magic and immortality being one of Savathûn’s Deathsingers gave her, but would leave an ashen crater in the place of a best friend.

“Hold on for me, okay?” Even as Eris said it, she knew it didn’t sound like her. It sounded like the person she had once been, before she lost her eyes. But maybe that was what Brya needed.

“I will.” The Spirit turned in her foggy shell and brushed against Eris’ cheek, soft and warm and almost intangible.

The rest of the day was uneventful, except for Brya’s unusual reticence. There had been many days like this, many ceremonies. How many years since Eris’ first one, when she had pulled the soul out of a Light-worshipping rebel in front of a crowd and concreted her role as one of the twin Deathsingers? In the prickly pecking order of the Witch-Queen’s nobles she was both a member and a jester, a reminder of the world when no one else was bold enough to tell the queen the truth. Her being human didn’t matter to that role as much as performing it well did. While most humans were rank-and-file and most nobles Hive, exceptions ran both ways. There were even rumors of Eliksni villages that paid tithe.

But the Last City was where the Witch-Queen ruled Earth from, and the rare Deathsingers were essential parts of her court. They enabled her to escape her own death, and delivered others as tithe in the most symbolic and pure fashion.

Toland woke with some time to spare. He and Eris spent the early afternoon putting on formal robes, affixing jewels and lenses to horns and spines, buffing chitin with soft sand.

When time came for the ceremony, they stood in the center of the Last City.

Crumbling buildings buttressed by Hive nests circled the central plaza. The weather was perfect: clear and warm, with the slight greenness of storm light. On the other side of the mountain, foxes and marmots were going to ground.

In the city, Savathûn was presiding over the annual tithe of the rebels. The queen’s throne had been built into the side of a ruined skyscraper, so that she sat back into the revealed floors and her crown was itself surmounted by the bite taken out of the building. In front of her stood Eris and Toland, waiting for their turn to do the killing after the parade, the prayers, the speeches, the jostling among the nobles. Maybe some Hive would quarrel, and the tithe of blood would be stronger than expected.

Among the very few non-Hive in the audience stood Eriana-3. Eris wished she could gesture barest acknowledgement to her friend, but the ceremony must be performed with utter precision. Afterward, they could meet. For now, Eris felt Savathûn’s eyes on her back like a physical tether between them.

The Hive chattered and keened, waiting for the execution to begin. Eris leaned against Toland, her elbow folded against his. He interlaced his hands with hers, glove against glove. Hazy touches that morning were a sunlight memory. These touches, too, were expected, the crowd used to the Deathsingers moving as if the boundaries between bodies were meaningless.

Along the wide road came Amanda’s work. The captives were carried in crystalline carts built on the rusted chassis of old human machines. Toland began to keen, weakening the captives, the notes setting off sympathetic vibration in Eris’ jaw. Eris could almost hear a drumbeat in her head, but music made with instruments was one human affectation the Hive had not adopted.

Knights wearing black tabards pulled the rebels from the car to the center of the circle. Where a fountain had once stood was now just the shallow bowl at the bottom, a rough cell. At the center grew a fan of hard coral. Even tied with rope and magic, abandoned by the Light they still professed impotent loyalty to, the captives still struggled to fight.

Eris glided forward and took from her belt an obsidian knife as long as her forearm. Green pustules dotted its length, and lacunae where others had burned through. The edge, though, was perfectly intact.

The crowd quieted as she approached the lip of the fountain. The Light-aligned captives always held the same look: repressed fear, courage in quivering lips and clenched fists. These five — three humans, one Awoken, one rusting Exo — were no different. As she neared they kept struggling. In the shallow pool they were forced to look up at her, even though most would have been taller had she been standing level with them. Her horns and headdress made her appear taller, her bright green eyes more inscrutable. Although she could have floated above them, the ceremony did not call for it. This was to be close-up slaughter.

Eris remembered the touch of Toland’s hands on her face as she lifted the knife.

_The night at the palace of the Osmium King, the blue city lights below us._

A rebel wrested his meaty arm from his living bonds and swung a punch at her face. She dipped the knife just enough to catch him through the fingers and pin his hand to the ritual coral. Her heartbeat didn’t change. A little bit of fight entertained everyone.

_The Osmium palace? What is that? When was I there?_

Ur uncoiled far away, looking down from the top of the pyramid of tribute.

Eris bared her teeth, canted her jaw, felt ichor run to the back of her throat and burn into the carefully cultivated crevices. This former Lightbearer would see her sterile-white teeth, would begin to feel his soul pulled from his body like raw egg slipping out of a shell. The song surrounded her even as she created it, a loop of power that strangled the rebels so that they began to bow. Toland’s screaming song twined with hers, loud enough to rattle windows. Some non-Hive in the crowd might suffer from it, but they would never dare show it. 

Memories rose as Eris went through the motions of the ritual she knew by heart. _In another world, I loved him and felt the ever-hunger melt away. Found peace in having, not chasing. In the present, not the future or the past. Felt the comfort of touch and scent._

_But why? Why did I need comfort?_

She held the knife to the throat of an Awoken, his life force already haloed out around him like the Light of the Ghost he had once known.

_I needed it in the Osmium court and the Dreadnaught; I needed it in the Towers and did not receive it …_

_The Towers. The real Towers._

Eris blinked.

Her eyes were crusted enough to make it difficult for one of them.

When she opened them again the world was so much _thinner._

Time was still passing. The cheers of the Hive and the Deathsong, scorching and yet harmless to her, still sounded. Except that Eris had forgotten something, and it was tremendously important, more important than the world, that she remember it. Recognizing her own need for comfort had reminded Eris of it.

Of the other world.

The world Eris had fought through different times and places to see. The world where Kass and her fireteam were, right now, fighting the Witch-Queen in the way only Guardians could.

The struggle of the Awoken under her hands didn’t matter at all, except that she had a tiny moment of guilt, regret, and anger that Savathûn had forced her into performing cruelty in this simulation.

Eris dropped the ritual knife and never heard it hit the flagstones. The sound of the crowd and the Song faded into an insignificant hum. Furious, she reminded herself what she was really fighting for: to kill Savathûn, to keep the Guardians and Toland safe, to claw out a space where, she, Eris, could have everything she wanted and see where she went from there. Maybe the Toland behind her was real, and maybe he wasn’t; either way, the love that reminded her of who she was did not come from a Deathsinger.

Under her fingers she felt the texture of reality, like a layer of dead skin, and she dug down past it.


	21. Chapter 19

Eris burrowed straight into the Court.

She emerged in the blue-black splendor of the Ascendant Plane. Spheres of Taken energy seethed in the sky like strange planets. Wind blew from nowhere, the frozen exhalation of some beast that was also the stone floor and the stalagmite-studded ceiling. Savathûn’s foyer was a beautiful, marbled dark place, and even more so this her throne room. Reflective runes shone iridescent on the floor. The throne itself waited in front of her, black spires and slick angles, but the Witch-Queen had left it empty. Eris would have to chase her up the wide steps that spiraled into the ceiling.

_That void architecture. Either horizontal as the taiga, or vertical as a blue Guardian’s first hazing commute._

If only Toland had been there, walking up the blue-black spiral behind her, their hands held tight. Except — no. She parsed her own desires as she began to walk up the black steps, her clothes rustling, her hands empty. Wide enough for six Guardians, these steps. And there would be no _except_ , no gentle denial of the fact that she wished she was not alone. Turning the idea of him over in her head was helpful — to have him here would be better.

She remembered the swipe of the Witch-Queen’s claws. Her stomach soured. Maybe Toland was dead, and maybe he was simply unmade in a way that did not apply to him, living forever. The stairs curved enough she walked over her own path. A glimmer of white light ahead might be a doorway. Either way, she would be ready.

Over and over in her mind turned spells she knew, weaknesses she could grasp. What could kill Savathûn in her own throne room? What secrets had Eris learned? So many. Another spiral in the stairs. The Osmium Court and the toddlers and the simplicity of love. There was some part of Sathona left even in real Savathûn.

Or maybe those pieces of the equation needed to be arranged differently.

If Eris could remind Savathûn of who she had once been, maybe there was a chance to destroy her that way. Paradox on paradox, making the re-writing the truth. Strangle the witch with her own history.

Eris smiled fiercely as she thought of it. For all the sympathy she felt for the krill children, none of it extended to the Witch-Queen in the real world. Savathûn had been there when the long, long lineage that lead to Crota started. Simply one of the lesser spawn of that brood had changed the fates of thousands of Guardians.

Eris intended to return the favor. Destroying Savathûn would wrest half of the Hive’s remaining power away from them, more so if she destroyed the worm with her. That would be the more difficult part. Ur the Ever-Hunger was torturer and enabler and barrister to Savathûn, their arcane negotiations one detail Eris had never been able to wrest out of her studies of the Hive. In part, the lack of knowledge had come by choice: it would satisfy Eris most to see the Hive killed, as it was their faces she had seen orchestrating so much horror. The worms remained in shadows, their effects felt like the tides on the ocean. Killing Savathûn would not stop the worms from putting other tyrants on other thrones.

For that, she needed to trust in the Guardians. If weakening or killing the worm was necessary to make Savathûn vulnerable, Kass or Ikora must be the ones to know and use that information. The thought curdled Eris’ stomach, but still she kept walking. Single-minded determination propelled one foot after another despite nausea.

Her foot slipped on the next step with a scraping sound. She grimaced and kept her balance by darting a glance downward. But when she looked up again there was something new in front of her.

Brya floated close. This wasn’t the green mist of the Spirit shell from the false world. Instead, Eris’ old Ghost wore a white shell that filled Eris with nostalgia and dim memory and the scent of incense and oil. The fireteam’s City apartment, their secret place where they planned Crota’s downfall. Brya looked and smelled like _before_.

But Eris knew the texture of illusion now. Knew the place where she stood was _her_ world’s Ascendant Plane, as real as such a shifting place could be. Knew that where she had stood with Kass, where the Guardians presumably were right now, was the true world. Brya lacked texture; on this new level Eris could read she seemed as flat as a piece of paper.

“You don’t need to do this,” Brya said. “Killing her won’t save the world. It’s not worth it.”

_None of that has stopped me before._ Still she valued Brya’s voice, trusted in it, but she knew the Witch-Queen was using that very trust against her..

Eris brushed her hand through the illusion. As she had expected, it wavered and disappeared, offering no resistance. Nevertheless the disappearance hit Eris like a distant death, making her limbs feel heavier, her legs aching. She struggled to keep from grimacing, succeeded.

One last turn. It was not sunlight up ahead. Instead, the light glowed in ivory beams from Savathûn’s eyes, from points of bioluminescence on her crown. Here she looked more human, her long arms folded, her body reclined. She sat on a reclining couch of indeterminate shape, misty and shifting. Not a throne room: an observatory, a screening room, the other side behind the steps filled with hundreds of eyes looking out onto hundreds of worlds. Behind her, dim shapes moved.

Savathûn pulled Eris to the floor in front of her.

The slam of the floor against Eris’ shoulder both hurt and disoriented her. Suddenly the throne was too close, Savathûn’s folded limbs too close, Eris’ chitin shoulder plate crumbling from the tip. A foot came down and then a hand and Savathûn was leaning over Eris, squeezing her throat.

“I’m tired of playing with you,” said the Witch-Queen.

“I could say the same.” Eris forced the words out, the last one almost inaudible.

Then she closed her eyes and conjured as she had done in the Dreadnaught.

It was harder here. Much harder. She was inventing an illusion as convincing as Savathûn’s of Brya, reverse-engineering one of the Witch-Queen’s many powers. It was a tiny knife to Savathûn’s sword, but Eris thought it would be enough.

As long as she could breathe long enough to do it. Savathûn squeezed her. Clever queen, not to forget that her strength remained in her body as well. Eris was smothering, light flashing behind her eyes, as she tried to remember the Osmium Court, the essence of Sathona. To remember her so well as to make her, just for a second, real. To out-think the strategist who had steered the Hive for millennia.

The darkness around her had begun to spin when Eris heard new footsteps on the marble.

“Who are you?” said the small voice of Sathona.

Savathûn loosened her grip in surprise. Eris craned her neck. From here she could only see the delicate feet of the illusion of the three princesses.

“It’s you,” said Aurash.

“You’re become a predator,” said Xi Ro.

From here, Eris could let go. This didn’t mean that she stopped fighting to stay conscious; she levered herself up under the Witch-Queen’s hand. But the story was set in motion now, the illusion running of its own volition as the others had. She needed less effort to maintain it. As long as Savathûn, clever one, did not think of the simple act of swiping at it with her other hand —

“We should never have become this,” said Eris as or through Sathona. When the krill reached for Savathûn’s claw, the Witch-Queen did not stop her. Savathûn was frozen, but the moment of surprise would not last long.

The tiny, almost translucent claw touched a knuckle scale the size of Eris’ arm. “We never became this,” said Sathona. From the plaintiveness in her voice Eris could picture the expression as the girl looked up at the spiked mass of her future self.

The world went white.

In a flare of paradox, Savathûn was simply unmade. Eris felt her fighting. Felt her trying to insist upon her own reality, trying to remember the kind of basis in truth she had forced Eris to forget. The one she had inadvertently taught Eris to banish. The Witch-Queen could have fought through the illusion, but there was enough of Sathona left in her, enough of Eris’ magic in Sathona, that the krill’s words created a real paradox at her core. It was as if Savathûn had never existed. As if the princesses had never made their fateful choice.

On the floor, Eris took a deep, rough breath with the terrible weight finally off her throat. She sat up, wincing. For a moment she caught the eyes of the three princesses and wanted to thank them, but this, too, was paradox; she would have been thanking herself. They dissipated away into nothing, leaving only the blue-black expanse of the wide floor. The eyes installed in the wall began to dim. Alone, Eris was left with a swell of triumphant energy, as if she had never struggled up the stairs at all.

She had done it. Two-thirds of the Hive’s royalty, gone. Disorganized. Still there would be work to do on Earth, and she needed to find the Guardians. Now, she could see that the figures behind her were the six of them, doing their own dance between the Ascendant Plane and the mortal realm to help Eris in ways she did not yet understand herself. Looking the other way, she saw through the eyes as Hive forces were stalled and confused, groups losing coherent formations, Knights stopping mid-swing in their confusion. Guardians there were quick to take advantage of the seconds of hesitation.

Eris climbed the sides of the monstrous reclining couch and sat there, for just a moment, to catch her breath and let her victory sink in.

What now?

Usually, after something like this, Guardians danced and counted their winnings.

Eris looked around the room again, wanting a moment to herself before she returned to the world. The throne below … if she sat there, what power would she command? What wounds could she claw across the face of Xivu Arath’s brood? What would taking it do to her? She had never wanted power: just revenge, and the power that came with it alone. Best to leave this place empty, let it wither up as the eyes were doing as she watched.

Nevertheless, she descended the stairs again. Warlock-curiosity and Hunter-independence lead her to look upon the throne. It crumbled, revealing a black expanse of stars and seething Taken event horizons behind it. Something glimmered from within the cracking stone and fell to Eris’ feet.

One of the Witch-Queen’s claws lay there, broken off or shed into a thin green-black blade.

_Remember taking the heart of Oryx’s sword? Best build something out of this. Encase it so it doesn’t grow roots._

Eris picked up the claw by the ragged, heavy end. Good shape for a sword. Good heft. She was already starting to imagine how to balance it out with metal and wards.

What do Guardians do? Count their winnings …

She made a portal back into the world she had come from at the very beginning of it all, and stepped through.


	22. Chapter 20

Ikora Rey walked along the edge of the Tower and felt the Light.

No matter how many wars befell her home, she always felt calmer walking on the narrow strip of common ground shared by Guardians and civilians. Before the day’s work started, before anyone asked her any questions, before her idle dreams and midnight eurekas had faded, she simply watched the play of colors on the mountains and the walls.

Hive seeders still smoldered on the outer edges of the walls. The big antiship guns had been cycled up and fired, but the Witch-Queen’s forces would have brute-forced and beguiled through if it hadn’t been for the precision strike.

Would the Tower have been safer under other leadership? Ikora accused herself. She had had this conversation many times. Her inner voice spoke more or less like Osiris depending on the day.

A sound like a single wing beat announced Eris’ arrival behind her. Ikora felt lighter as she turned, gad to be able to talk about a victory even if it would be couched in doomsaying.

Eris teleported out of a green cloud, then fell to her knees. She held something: a black-wrapped object half her height, and heavy. Both the physical weight and the headache pressure of Darkness told Ikora this was something bad.

Ikora knelt down, shouting over the ringing in her own ears. Civilians gasped further up the courtyard.

“It needs … the Light …” Eris’ voice was also muffled.

“What kind?”

In reply Eris sent her a _feeling_ , like the moods Ikora could sense from other Lightbearers but so clearly carried by the Darkness. Ikora forced herself to slow down, to separate Eris’ thoughts from her own, the Light from the Dark. The sending was tight-packed, information on information. It gave her enough.

She sent a thin lance of solar Light down the edge of the claw Eris held.

Solar ignited; Void cauterized. Flash-frozen edge dimmed from golden-hot to cold in an instant. The opaque mist and some of the keratin shattered away. Eris breathed hard over the edge left in her hands.

Ikora stood up. “There. Done. It’s all contained. There’s no danger here.” This to the civilians, whom had retreated. Wary eyes watched from inside the noodle stand. _Eris knows how to make an entrance._

Ikora sighed. And she had expected talk of victory! But Eris rose to her feet with the forged sword in her hand as easy as she had ever moved as a Guardian. The thing she held was still a rough sword, without a hilt or runnel or the metal parts she would have liked to include. But it was most emphatically no longer just a claw.

“What happened to you?” Ikora asked. “Are you all right? What is that —"

“My workbench was inaccessible,” said Eris by way of explanation, nonplussed.

“Maybe we should talk about this out of the sun,” said Ikora, hesitating in the face of Eris’ straightforwardness. She was used to it, though. Eris showed kindness in other ways. She had come here, after all, when the Tower was not always the most comfortable place for her.

So up they went to the reception room that had once been the Speaker’s office. Dutiful frames now kept tea hot. Ikora did some writing in this room, and had not moved the pile of papers off one of the chairs since her last foray into her current project. Eris remained unbothered. Ikora, used to her friend’s inscrutable reactions, nevertheless felt that she was missing something hidden in Eris’ lack of affect.

“Savathûn is gone, then?” Ikora started, resting her hand on the back of a wicker chair.

Eris met her eyes. “She is dead. I have unmade her.” Eris carefully placed the sword on the wooden table. “This will be a great weapon against any other Hive who attempt to storm our shores. The Young Wolf should know of it.” Eris’ lips curled into a slight smile.

“She should be on her way back from the Moon now.” Ikora sat, grateful, if she was being honest with herself, for the relief of her friend and to be out of the spotlight and for the smell of the tea.

“Once I am sure of her safe return I can tend to my own wounds.”

“What wounds? Eris, what wounds?” Her stomach sinking, Ikora looked for spots of blood.

“Oh, they are only wounds in my mind.”

Ikora resisted her urge to lean back and sigh. Eris _was_ hurt; Eris had hurts piled on hurts, and if she wished to express them this way, it was her right to do so. Perhaps Ikora’s immediate reaction had bled through a little bit. Eris sat straighter.

“In order to defeat the Witch-Queen, I had to give something of my own away. To lose something which had kept me going through her trickery. Some tricks of my own, in fact, but it feels now as though they were real … and as if when I lost them … ” Eris laughed bitterly. “Forgive me. Toland’s words fit better than my own sometimes. When I lost my sight, did I not gain another?”

“You don’t have to tell me everything that happened if you don’t want to. But I’m here for you. Tea?”

“Yes. Yes, I think that would settle me nicely.”

Eris did not, throughout the long afternoon and evening that followed, elaborate on what she had said. She had traveled through other worlds of the Witch-Queen’s making; Ikora knew this much, and Eris explained it in so many words to Kass and her fireteam when they joined the two women later. But Eris seemed to want to hold the loss private, and Ikora respected that.

Once Eris drew Kass aside. Ikora still often thought of Kass as very young; she had been a Guardian for under ten years, a fraction of either Ikora or Eris’ experience. Watching them talk close felt like looking at family. Ikora — who noted that Zavala had appeared at the quiet reception and left not long after — felt a sympathetic pang.

Elsewhere Guardians would be rejoicing loudly. As the afternoon wore on, more people came back from patrols and strikes and long watches. Through the open door Ikora could hear their footsteps, their chatter and laughter. The light and the Light moved gently across the Tower in sweeps and orbits. Inside, the feeling of camaraderie was softer but no less tangible. Guardians swapped stories, brought home-made food. Never would some of these stories be so small again, Ikora thought, knowing and loving the way embellishment and drift would turn the day into a legend.

As, surely, it had been. She may not have seen the way Eris had battled the Witch-Queen, but the sword stayed in the center of the table, between plates of pastries, as a trophy.

* * *

Toland the Shattered haunted the Moon.

Returning to the world had disoriented him. Weeks as a corporeal person, weeks bound to the ground, distorted his sense of time. Had his journey to Fundament taken place before the Hellmouth? Had he met Eris before his last death, or after?

As a wisp he drifted to a jagged outcropping of gray stone on the Moon and looked at the rising Earth.

No. The answer to the last question was most certainly _before_. Eris had always been before. Remembering her helped put his sense of time back in place.

But just as it did, he remembered too that he did not know where she was. What had happened after she had broken out of that last vision?

Seconds before the panic of that question sank in, she appeared at the bottom of the jut of stone. Now, his thoughts ordered around her in yet another way. Once, he had haunted her, writing letters from the Sea of Screams when he wished and providing no guarantee of answer when she replied. Now, she appeared where and when she wished. He, tethered to the Ascendant Plane, waited at the few open doors and hoped for her appearance.

How much of his life had been spent calling out to other people, hoping for an answer?

No more, at least. Eris had taken to answering of her own accord, and neither of them felt they needed to be coy about their visitations any more.

What she would think of his Ascendant form, the spark he had become when his body had been pulled through layers of reality in which only the greatest of the Hive could perfectly mirror themselves, he did not know. Perhaps did not have the capacity, without a heart to beat, to know.

“I bring a gift,” Eris called.

“Yet I should be bringing one to you.” He descended the jut of rock slowly, not because he did not wish to be seen to rush but because he wanted to savor the moment. “The Witch-Queen must have fallen.”

“You didn’t know?”

“After that final illusion, I was returned here.”

“I would have come back earlier, except that I wished to have the spell that is the gift ready. And because I hoped to find some comfort in Ikora.”

“Did you?”

“Perhaps. Not of the same kind.”

She held her hands out and conjured. Toland let her. For a moment he thought that he should no longer so willingly let things act upon him, should not so readily await another’s will for his answer. But he had already learned the differences between Eris and Ir Yût many times over.

Only when he shut them did he realize he had eyes again. Eris stood with the shadow of the Earth on her, her hands lowering.

Toland pulled at his own sleeves. Eris had returned to him the body he had before the ill-fated Raid, mostly. He patted at his own eyes, explored his hair. “You wonder. How?”

“I cannot mold the real world like I could mold Savathûn’s creations. But some knowledge, some spark, translates. It helps no one but you, unique case that you are.”

“Flattery is welcome.”

“You haven’t changed entirely.” Eris embraced him, her head against his chest. The void-stuff felt the give and take of the touches, muted but present.“This way, we can be together as we were,” Eris continued.

In stunned amazement, Toland pressed his face against the top of her cowled head. As if given permission by the touch, she slackened and hunched her shoulders. So, this new body was sensitive enough. “What still troubles you?” He asked.

Illusion had done them good during the Witch-Queen’s schemes, but there was no more space for it now.

She looked up at him. “In order to defeat Savathûn, I conjured Sathona for the last time. Like matter and antimatter, the two could not exist together. After all that time with the krill, I …”

“Smart rascals, weren’t they? If they lived on the Moon we could send Guardians on all kind of errands to bring them cupped flowers and shiny stones and stories.”

Eris drew to arms’ length. “It isn’t that I want them here. But for a little while … as you said, I thought of a future with them. A way to re-make the loss. Savathûn herself could neither learn from her younger self or accept her, and so …Yet I won’t sell myself short. It was my spell destroyed her, not some cosmic rule. My rule alone.”

With the assurance in her voice, something switched; Toland no longer felt the need to comfort her. Instead, Eris was the one standing strong against his uncertainties. He was certain after everything that they could both hold both roles: reassuring and being reassured, bowing to no other powers.

“Sometimes, I am lonely,” he said softly.

Eris whispered in his ear. “You may be lonely again. With me or without me. Trust nothing, stomach no lies, and insist on a moment as clear as a pane of glass.”

“They used to call me vitreous.” He kissed the side of her mouth. … “Between us, we surely have enough eyes and glass to see the way forward.”

So the Earth spun, and they held one another, and when the silence grew dull they ventured out to find a peaceful place to walk. 


End file.
